This paper proposes an index-based assessment tool to consolidate diverse opinions of various stakeholders on their assessments of sector-specific risks posed by climate change, and to aggregate these opinions into intuitive and comparable graphs. This tool enables cities to measure and monitor the multiple factors that contribute to their resilience towards climate risk and hazard in the long term. We applied this tool to five key infrastructure sectors in six representative cities in the Yangtze River Delta region. The graphs generated provide for the first time first-hand insights into the aggregative understanding of various stakeholders with regard to the current and future climate risk in their concerned sectors and cities. Our results indicate that a high level of exposure is not automatically associated with a high level of vulnerability across our selected cities. While all cities need to make efforts to reduce their vulnerability towards climate hazards, those characterized by “lower level of exposure but higher level of vulnerability” need to make more urgent and much greater efforts.
As the body responsible for the functioning of the strategic road network, the work of the Highways Agency influences the lives of millions of people across England. Highways are critical to the UK economy. Therefore, their efficient and effective functioning promotes national well-being. At the same time, the Highways Agency recognises that roads can have profound impacts on the local well-being of neighbouring communities. This paper discusses the drivers shaping the Highway Agency's response to social and community effects. It summarises research on what social sustainability means for road schemes, and describes how these findings could form the basis for a new methodology for assessing community effects. The Highways Agency is considering the possibility of including this methodology in its widely used Design Manual for Roads and Bridges (DMRB). A revised chapter in the manual would provide strengthened guidance on how environmental assessments should account for the effects of road schemes on communities including the different groups of people within these communities. It would be a key resource for designers and engineers to understand and address the social dimensions of new road construction and the maintenance and improvement of existing roads.
<p>Climate resilient infrastructure is essential for the safety, wellbeing, sustainability and economic prosperity of cities. An understanding of current and future climate risks is an essential consideration for the planning, design, delivery and management of new and existing resilient infrastructure systems. While there is a growing number of tools which focus on assessing specific components of climate risk there is a need for tools which help bridge the gap between climate science, resilience practitioners, infrastructure owners and policy makers.</p><p>The Climate Risk Infrastructure Assessment Tool developed within the Climate Science for Service Partnership China (CSSP China) aims to help planners and policy-makers understand how climate change may impact a city&#8217;s infrastructure systems. CSSP China seeks to bring together climate practitioners in China and the UK, and to forge links between climate scientists and industry practitioners to develop practical tools that translate the science into valuable insights for policymaking, planning and design. The development of this tools builds on earlier work carried out with the Shanghai Met Service and the British Embassy in Beijing to develop a qualitative tool to guide the assessment of climate risks for infrastructure.</p><p>The tool guides the user through a semi-quantitative climate risk assessment for a section of an infrastructure system. At present it uses ensemble data from global climate models from the Coupled Model Intercomparison Project Phase 5 (CMIP5) to estimate and visualise future climate change projections helping cities understand the current and future likelihood of weather events. The tool then enables cities to assess the overall impact of severe weather on infrastructure by determining its vulnerability and criticality. Risk is estimated as a combination of event likelihood and impact. For key risks, guidance on implementing appropriate adaptation measures is provided to support planners and policy-makers to consider what action is needed.</p>
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