Guide for Climate-Resilient Cities: An Urban Critical Infrastructures Approach

Abstract

Climate change (CC) is one of the most challenging issues ever faced, as it affects every system worldwide at any scale. Urban areas are not an exception. Extreme weather-related events have seriously affected urban areas in recent years, and they have a significant impact on the welfare of people. According to UN projections, by 2050 more than 68% of the world's population could be concentrated in urban areas. Additionally, daily life in urban areas is highly dependent on certain critical services and products provided by critical infrastructures (CIs). Therefore, it is especially relevant to understand how CC affects urban CIs in order to develop mechanisms to improve their capacity to handle crises derived from CC. In this context, resilience-based strategies provide a holistic approach, considering both predictable and unpredictable threats. This paper proposes a guide for assessing and enhancing the resilience level of cities against CC, considering urban CIs as key agents in improving the city's capacity to face and recover from CC-related crises. The guide was developed through a co-creation process in which two cities in the Basque Country (Spain) worked together with CI providers and other relevant stakeholders in the resilience-building process. The resulting guide is to be used by city stakeholders at a strategic level, providing them with: (1) a qualitative assessment of the city's current resilience level in the CC context; (2) better knowledge about urban CI sectors, their interdependency relationships and the chain of impacts due to cascading effects in the short, medium and in the long term and; (3) a set of policies that enhance city resilience.The fight against the consequences of CC has been gaining relevance in the last three decades, and countries all over the world are taking action against CC impacts [5][6][7][8]. On the one hand, they adopt mitigation strategies with the aim of reducing greenhouse gases emissions, and on the other hand, they develop adaptation strategies in order to adjust to the current and projected future effects of CC. The standard approach to planning for climate adaptation relies on using predictions based on CC projections as the basis to identify measures for prevention. Moreover, by focusing on specific impacts, CC adaptation approaches may not consider other indirect effects or long-term stresses [9]. Nevertheless, recent studies demonstrate there is uncertainty associated with CC projections [1], as climate conditions are becoming increasingly variable and dynamic. This high degree of uncertainty requires new strategies that consider the dynamics of the threats. In this sense, traditional risk management-based approaches are not enough to deal with CC impacts.Moreover, this context is challenging since urban areas have become more and more complex consisting of an extensive network of people, infrastructures and services that are strongly interconnected. In particular, the welfare of these urban areas is highly dependent on the proper functioning of critical inf...

Reviewing qualitative research approaches in the context of critical infrastructure resilience

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