Multi-Risk Climate Mapping for the Adaptation of the Venice Metropolitan Area

Abstract

Climate change risk reduction requires cities to undertake urgent decisions. One of the principal obstacles that hinders effective decision making is insufficient spatial knowledge frameworks. Cities climate adaptation planning must become strategic to rethink and transform urban fabrics holistically. Contemporary urban planning should merge future threats with older and unsolved criticalities, like social inequities, urban conflicts and “drosscapes”. Retrofitting planning processes and redefining urban objectives requires the development of innovative spatial information frameworks. This paper proposes a combination of approaches to overcome knowledge production limits and to support climate adaptation planning. The research was undertaken in collaboration with the Metropolitan City of Venice and the Municipality of Venice, and required the production of a multi-risk climate atlas to support their future spatial planning efforts. The developed tool is a Spatial Decision Support System (SDSS), which aids adaptation actions and the coordination of strategies. The model recognises and assesses two climate impacts: Urban Heat Island and Flooding, representing the Metropolitan City of Venice (CMVE) as a case study in complexity. The model is composed from multiple assessment methodologies and maps both vulnerability and risk. The atlas links the morphological and functional conditions of urban fabrics and land use that triggers climate impacts. The atlas takes the exposure assessment of urban assets into account, using this parameter to describe local economies and social services, and map the uneven distribution of impacts. The resulting tool is therefore a replicable and scalable mapping assessment able to mediate between metropolitan and local level planning systems.

A Long-Term Ecological Vulnerability Analysis of the Tibetan Region of Natural Conditions and Ecological Protection Programs

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Integrating Ecosystem Vulnerability in the Environmental Regulation Plan of Izmir (Turkey)—What Are the Limits and Potentialities?

“…The approach we used can be collocated among the experimental works which want to define new tools and methods for supporting the decision making of environmental planning at different scales [12][13][14]. Particularly, we intend to bridge the gap between theory and the practical utilization of the Ecosystem Service in real planning documents, as indicated by Costanza et al (2017), where the revision of the ES cascade model shows how spatial modelling constitutes a basic pre-condition for achieving the sustainability of plans and projects at different scales [15,16].…”

Designing Urban Green Infrastructures Using Open-Source Data—An Example in Çiğli, Izmir (Turkey)

“…Nowadays, scientists observe changes in the Earth's climate in almost every region of the World, and the entire system is undergoing a rapid transformation [1,2]. Climate change increases the possibility and the impacts of catastrophic environmental phenomena occurring at the ecological, societal, and economic level [3][4][5]. Most of the observed consequences are happening at an unprecedented rate [6], and perhaps these changes will be irreversible for hundreds of thousands of years [7,8].…”