Vulnerability Assessment Tool for Cities Preparing for Climate Change
Abstract
Cities throughout the Great Lakes region and beyond share similar impacts from climate change, including more extreme precipitation events and high heat days. These factors increase a city's vulnerabilities across the built environment and social fabric of a city. Cities require vulnerability assessments (VAs) for virtually every planning process (i.e., natural hazards, infrastructure, climate change), but they are rarely coordinated across existing planning domains. To save municipal staff time and resources that are often dedicated to duplicate VAs, The Huron River Watershed Council (HRWC), the Great Lakes Climate Adaptation Network (GLCAN), and the Great Lakes Integrated Sciences and Assessments (GLISA) worked with five Great Lakes cities to develop a universal VA template to mainstream climate adaptation planning. GLCAN is a regional, peer network of local government staff working together on climate adaptation in the region and it has been actively cooperating with a regional climate organization, GLISA - a NOAA-supported program - to create information in support of decision making in member cities. In this example of sustained engagement, HRWC, GLCAN and GLISA worked as a boundary chain to move climate information from producers at the universities to users in the cities, as well as across cities. GLISA worked with project partners to jointly develop climate information to populate the tool, including historical observations, future projections, and localized thresholds. The tool is intended to mainstream the adaptation planning process and result in the integration of climate-smart and equity-focused information into all types of city planning. Several cities in the region are already utilizing the tool in their planning, and additional funding has been obtained to both expand the tool to stormwater management projects in six additional cities in the Great Lakes and to develop a socioeconomic mapping tool for climate risk planning in the Great Lakes and Mid-Atlantic. This presentation will summarize the joint development process of the VA tool and provide an overview of the tool, including examples of its implementation and scalability for cities beyond the Great Lakes.
- Publication:
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AGU Fall Meeting Abstracts
- Pub Date:
- December 2018
- Bibcode:
- 2018AGUFMPA11I0848C
- Keywords:
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- 4321 Climate impact;
- NATURAL HAZARDSDE: 4343 Preparedness and planning;
- NATURAL HAZARDSDE: 6334 Regional planning;
- POLICY SCIENCESDE: 6620 Science policy;
- PUBLIC ISSUES