Urban Climate Science for Planning Healthy Cities

Abstract

The rise of mega- and high-density compact cities are now irreversible trends of human urban development. While megacities and high-density urban living may make lives more convenient and society more economically efficient, they pose a range of environmental challenges, especially as increasingly dense, complex and interdependent urban systems leave cities vulnerable and sensitive to climate variability and change. Climate threats come mainly in the form of poor air quality, windstorms, heat waves, drought and floods. Flowing from these are a range of possible health impacts including death, physical injury, heat-related illness, vector- and water-borne disease and mental illness. The visibility of how climate affects cities and their infrastructure and inhabitants has generated wide-ranging concern from both the general public, local and national governments and international agencies. This ‘climate of concern’ has very much led to the emergence of the call for climate resilient cities especially as minds become focused on how climate change may have fundamental influences on how cities might have to plan for the future. Given this, a pressing imperative is to generate information about the causes of urban-based climate hazards and disasters and to acquire spatial and quantitative understanding of exposure and vulnerability of people and infrastructure in cities. To achieve this, a cross-disciplinary collaboration among scientists, planners, government, non-governmental organisations, the private sector and also the general public is required. However, the application of urban climate science in the realm of planning for healthy living in cities has had low uptake in the policy arena. This apparent intransigence in the city planning and policy community is most likely related more to the lack of data and hence information related to a number of unanswered urban climate questions, as opposed to the resistance to mainstreaming climate information into devising policy. Some of these questions include how to assess current and future climatic extremes and relevant health risks, how to make decisions to enhance climate resilience to climate extremes and disasters, the modes by which information should be conveyed to city leaders and stakeholders and how and what mitigation and adaptation actions are needed to cope with climate change in cities. These questions provide the context for this book entitled ‘Urban Climate Science for Planning Healthy Cities’.