RAF Resilience Assessment Framework—A Tool to Support Cities’ Action Planning

Abstract

Urban areas are dynamic, facing evolving hazards, having interacting strategic services and assets. Their management involves multiple stakeholders bringing additional complexity. Potential impacts of climate dynamics may aggravate current conditions and the appearance of new hazards. These challenges require an integrated and forward-looking approach to resilient and sustainable urban development, being essential to identify the real needs for its achievement. Several frameworks for assessing resilience have been developed in different fields. However, considering the focus on climate change and urban services, specific needs were identified, particularly in assessing strategic urban sectors and their interactions with others and with the wider urban system. A resilience assessment framework was developed directing and facilitating an objective-driven resilience diagnosis of urban cities and services. This supports the decision on selection of resilience measures and the development of strategies to enhance resilience, outlining a path to co-build resilience action plans, and to track resilience progress in the city or service over time. This paper presents the framework and the main results of its application to three cities having diverse contexts. It was demonstrated that the framework highlights where cities and urban services stand, regarding resilience to climate change, and identifies the most critical aspects to improve, including expected future impacts.

Resilience to climate change in Ghanaian cities and its implications for urban policy and planning

“…Extensive research has been conducted on urban resilience assessments (Cardoso et al 2020;Sharifi and Yamagata 2016;Archer et al 2014;Gargiulo et al 2017). Building urban resilience, therefore, requires an assessment of multifaceted criteria for urban settings.…”

“…Therefore, it will be the responsibility of cities to work towards achieving the goal of making cities and human settlements inclusive, safe, sustainable and more resilient against climate change. Research shows that there is a need to develop assessment methods that capture the dynamics of the resilience idea and make it more meaningful to the public and policy makers (Cardoso et al 2020;Jabareen 2013;Moraci et al 2018;Spaans and Waterhout 2017). Resilience assessment can also help societies to recognise their vulnerabilities and formulate action to resolve them.…”

Index-based Approach to Evaluate City Resilience in Flooding Scenarios

“…Under the scope of climate changes and urban resilience, urban flooding poses a current challenge for riverine or coastal settlings, with high potential for worsening, increasing the urgency of analyzing this issue and finding methodologies that can support decision makers [6]. Several multidimensional and multisectoral urban resilience assessment frameworks have been developed considering climate change, mainly in the last decade, although stormwater systems, as urban service, have been poorly addressed [7,8]. Other works have been developed at a more sectorial level, mainly by using 1D or 1D/2D modelling to simulate the performance of the sewerage network, in the first case, or of the sewerage network and surface flows, in the second case.…”

Spatialized flood resilience measurement in rapidly urbanized coastal areas with a complex semi-arid environment in northern Morocco

“…All of those previous indicators were applied to quantify community resilience to multiple natural hazards. Qassim et al (2016) determined community resilience to a particular hazard, "floods", and specific community, "urban areas", as recently proposed also by Cariolet et al (2019). However, many particular indicators were developed for a specific case of urban resilience to a specific hazard like floods.…”