According to this model, increasing “resilience” is primarily seen as identifying and reducing “hot spots” of risk, which are defined based on past hazards, the existing built environment and plans in place to respond to hazards. The hot spots approach isolates vulnerability geographically and fails to take into account the variation in vulnerability associated with the characteristics, capacities and interactions of people living in the hot spots. A study of the vulnerability of port cities by the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) (Nicholls et al., 2008, p. 9) takes a similar approach and explicitly refers to the importance of protective measures rather than adaptive capacity in mediating impact: “[T]he linkage between exposure and the residual risk of impact depends upon flood (and wind) protection measures.” It is clear, however, that the linkage depends on much more. In contrast, several recent frameworks for assessing climate risk in urban areas have the stated intention of bringing together measures of exposure to hazards with indices of the potential for cities to withstand and respond to these risks, yet appear in many cases to simply list these rather than incorporate them in a meaningful way. The World Wide Fund for Nature’s (WWF) Mega-stress for Mega-cities (WWF, n.d.) lists exposure to hazards (temperature, precipitation, sea level rise), physical and social vulnerability (infrastructure, population, land use, governance) and low levels of adaptive capacity as the key determinants of urban stress as a result of climate change. Similarly, the Climate and Disaster Resilience Initiative (CDRI) of Kyoto University assesses resilience based on five criteria—physical dimension, natural dimension, social dimension, institutional dimension, economic dimension—and combines these into a single measure of resilience (CDRI, 2009). Perhaps the approach that takes the largest number of factors into account is the city climate “risk assessment” proposed by Mehrotra et al. (2009), which incorporates hazards, vulnerabilities and adaptive capacity: • Hazards: temperature (observed trend and projections for 2050s); precipitation (observed trend and projections for 2050s); sea level rise (observed trend and projections for 2050s); extreme events. • Vulnerabilities: population; density; percentage poor/slum dweller; per cent of urban area (or population) susceptible to flooding; city percentage of national GDP. • Adaptive capacity: institutions and governance measures affecting climate change actions; willingness of city leadership to address climate change (e.g., through membership of international groups like C40 Cities Climate Leadership Group); information and resources to provide a comprehensive analysis of climate risks for the city; whether an administrative unit is assigned to address climate change. However, adding more and more measures to an exposure-based index does not result in a better and more actionable understanding of vulnerability, particularly as it applies to the characteristics and capacities of people. These frameworks still present vulnerability as being a characteristic in its own right, rather than seeing it also as an outcome of the interactions between geographical (natural environment), physical (built environment) and social processes. In contrast, it is more useful to ask specific questions that aid in understanding the nature of exposure within countries and communities. These questions high10
The De mogra ph y of Ada ptation to C l imate Ch ange
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