Enhancing Urban Climate Resistance Through the Application of Selected Strategies and Technologies

Adapting cities for climate resilience is one of the most pressing tasks for urban areas, as climate change is projected to increase both the frequency and severity of extreme weather events. A summary is presented of a broad set of resilience strategies that can potentially improve resilience of urban areas in four critical domains water, food, shelter, and energy. These strategies range from short-term, easy-to-implement solutions to more extensive, long-term plans, and can be applied in new and existing neighborhoods. A flexible framework is proposed for evaluating and implementing these urban resilience strategies. As a first stage, the framework presents a scoring system to prioritize strategies applied to each of the four domains, based on resilience criteria such as cost, maintenance required, impact, level of acceptability, regulations required, and scalability. These resilience criteria can be adjusted based on local context. The second stage of the framework allows to prioritize strategies that can simultaneously contribute to multiple domains. Weights are assigned to resilience domains according to the priority of enhancing specific objectives (e.g. water management, energy, etc.). The third stage allows to combine the first and second stages, prioritizing strategies that can simultaneously contribute to different resilience objectives, while also satisfying specific criteria such as reduced cost, reduced maintenance and others. This allows to identify optimal combinations of strategies for a particular urban context, that better aligns with given objectives and resources. Incorporating data related to the resilience criteria (e.g. costs, impacts, and community acceptance), the methodology provides a robust, data-driven ranking of resilience strategies. Such a framework can support urban planners and policymakers in taking well-informed decisions to improve efficiently urban resilience. This framework can be applied in part or in whole, to meet specific objectives.