Adaptation to heat health risk among vulnerable urban residents: a multi-city approach
Abstract
Recent studies on climate impacts demonstrate that climate change will have differential consequences in the U.S. at the regional and local scales. Changing climate is predicted to increase the frequency, intensity and impacts of extreme heat events prompting the need to develop preparedness and adaptation strategies that reduce societal vulnerability. Central to understanding societal vulnerability, is population’s adaptive capacity, which, in turn, influences adaptation, the actual adjustments made to cope with the impacts from current and future hazardous heat events. To-date, few studies have considered the complexity of vulnerability and its relationship to capacity to cope with or adapt to extreme heat. In this presentation we will discuss a pilot project conducted in 2009 in Phoenix, AZ, which explored urban societal vulnerability and adaptive capacity to extreme heat in several neighborhoods. Household-level surveys revealed differential adaptive capacity among the neighborhoods and social groups. In response to this pilot project, and in order to develop a methodological framework that could be used across locales, we also present an expansion of this project into Houston, TX and Toronto, Canada with the goal of furthering our understanding of adaptive capacity to extreme heat in very different urban settings. This presentation will communicate the results of the extreme heat vulnerability survey in Phoenix as well as the multidisciplinary, multi-model framework that will be used to explore urban vulnerability and adaptation strategies to heat in Houston and Toronto. We will outline challenges and opportunities in furthering our understanding of adaptive capacity and the need to approach these problems from a macro to a micro level.
- Publication:
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AGU Fall Meeting Abstracts
- Pub Date:
- December 2010
- Bibcode:
- 2010AGUFM.U52A..05W
- Keywords:
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- 0468 BIOGEOSCIENCES / Natural hazards;
- 1600 GLOBAL CHANGE