An Index-Based Assessment of Perceived Climate Risk and Vulnerability for the Urban Cluster in the Yangtze River Delta Region of China

Main author: Sun, Landong
Other authors: Tian, Zhan
Zou, Huan
Shao, Lanzhu
Sun, Laixiang
Dong, Guangtao
Fan, Dongli
Huang, Xinxing
Frost, Laura
Fox-James, Lewis
Format: Journal Article           
Online access: Click here to view record


Summary: This paper proposes an index-based assessment tool to consolidate diverse opinions of various stakeholders on their assessments of sector-specific risks posed by climate change, and to aggregate these opinions into intuitive and comparable graphs. This tool enables cities to measure and monitor the multiple factors that contribute to their resilience towards climate risk and hazard in the long term. We applied this tool to five key infrastructure sectors in six representative cities in the Yangtze River Delta region. The graphs generated provide for the first time first-hand insights into the aggregative understanding of various stakeholders with regard to the current and future climate risk in their concerned sectors and cities. Our results indicate that a high level of exposure is not automatically associated with a high level of vulnerability across our selected cities. While all cities need to make efforts to reduce their vulnerability towards climate hazards, those characterized by “lower level of exposure but higher level of vulnerability” need to make more urgent and much greater efforts.
Other authors: Tian, Zhan, Zou, Huan, Shao, Lanzhu, Sun, Laixiang, Dong, Guangtao, Fan, Dongli, Huang, Xinxing, Frost, Laura, Fox-James, Lewis
Language: English
Published: MDPI 2019
Subjects: