Quantifying Climate Risks for Urban Environments
Abstract
High-density urban areas are both uniquely vulnerable and uniquely able to adapt to climate change. Enabling this potential requires identifying the vulnerabilities, however, and these depend strongly on location: the challenges climate change poses for a southern coastal city such as Miami, for example, have little in common with those facing a northern inland city such as Chicago. By combining local knowledge with climate science, risk assessment, engineering analysis, and adaptation planning, it is possible to develop relevant climate information that feeds directly into vulnerability assessment and long-term planning. Key steps include: developing climate projections tagged to long-term weather stations within the city itself that reflect local characteristics; mining local knowledge to identify existing vulnerabilities to, and costs of, weather and climate extremes; understanding how future projections can be integrated into the planning process; and identifying ways in which the city may adapt. Using examples from our work in the cities of Boston, Chicago, and Mobile we illustrate the practical application of this approach to quantify the impacts of climate change on these cities and identify robust adaptation options as diverse as reducing the urban heat island effect, protecting essential infrastructure, changing design standards and building codes, developing robust emergency management plans, and rebuilding storm sewer systems.
- Publication:
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AGU Fall Meeting Abstracts
- Pub Date:
- December 2013
- Bibcode:
- 2013AGUFMGC52A..02H
- Keywords:
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- 1630 GLOBAL CHANGE Impacts of global change;
- 1637 GLOBAL CHANGE Regional climate change