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Turin Green Living Areas Workshop
ReMED’s first deliverable mapped the existing knowledge, indicators and tools on urban resilience. They refer to the ability of an urban system to anticipate, prepare for, and respond to climate-related disruptions, while maintaining essential functions and recovering swiftly. Related to climate change these efforts require a collaboration across various sectors and levels of governance. Policymakers, urban planners, businesses, and communities must work together to develop and implement strategies that enhance the adaptive capacity of cities.
Specific climate risks result from a combination of local conditions, including climate hazards, exposures and vulnerabilities.
- Hazard refers to the climate-related events or trends, such as extreme weather (e.g., heatwaves, floods, storms) or long-term processes (e.g., sea-level rise, desertification), that can lead to adverse impacts on human or ecological systems;
- Exposure involves the presence of people, ecosystems, infrastructure, or assets in areas that could be negatively affected by climatic hazards;
- Vulnerability represents the susceptibility of the exposed systems to harm, considering physical, social, economic, and environmental factors that reduce or amplify the impact of climatic hazards.
A climate risk is not just a function of the physical hazard itself but also depends on how much and how vulnerable and exposed the systems are. Accordingly, a climate risk increases when hazards are more severe, exposure is high and vulnerability is significant.
Various Assessment Methods, Tools and Indicators address building and urban resilience to climate change. However, the main limitation of these models, is their low degree of replicability due to the lack of detailed information at urban scale and their dependence on numerous intrinsic and environmental parameters, depending on local characteristics.
As a starting point, the ReMED Assessment system exploits the available information and main results from 15 national and European methodologies and assessment systems dealing with risk and vulnerability to climate change at building and urban scale.
Most of these methodologies are related to climatological hazards, followed by hydrological, meteorological and geophysical hazards. The most frequent hazards related to the existing methodologies are heat waves, flash floods and droughts.
Most of the reported methodologies apply to large urban scale (Neighbourhood, City, Province – Metropolitan area, Region). About 40% of the proposed methodologies have high-medium complexity, 23% high, 23% low, and 15% have medium complexity.
A total of 181 indicators have been identified, for building and urban scale (Neighbourhood, City, Province – Metropolitan area, Region). About half (46%) of the available indicators refer to the urban scale, while 14% can be applicable to both scales.
Two thirds of the indicators are quantitative, which is preferable in order to be able to consistently assess and quantify the specific indicators. On the other hand, it reflects the difficulties that may be encountered in order to collect and use the necessary input data. Overall, the vast majority of the proposed indicators (76%) are related to vulnerability risk, about 17% to hazard risk and only 7% to exposure risk.
Some indicators already available in European and National assessment methods can also be considered in ReMED since they aim at common goals.
