Worldwide, urban areas are increasingly being affected by climate change impacts, including rising sea levels, increasing flooding frequency, and more intense and longer heat waves. Climate risks intersect with ongoing social processes, exacerbating urban poverty and inequality, thus pushing people into further vulnerability. Over the past years, climate vulnerability has drawn the attention of many institutions and scholars, leading to the conceptualisation of various frameworks and indexes to assess climate vulnerability. However, this conceptual work has not been fully integrated into decision-support frameworks. In this project, we review the literature on climate vulnerability, consolidating existing work into a framework to support urban planning and policy. We develop the concept of ‘units of vulnerability’ to guide the allocation of urban interventions. Through an intersectional lens, the concept considers the compounding effect of the multiple factors that make people vulnerable to the impacts of climate change, including income, age, and gender, among others. Our framework enables the exploration of multiple scenarios through a coverage problem approach: It seeks to cover as many units of vulnerability as possible given specific constraints, including physical and financial constraints. This way, the benefits of urban interventions are allocated to the most vulnerable groups, ensuring a just climate transition.
We demonstrate our approach for the city of The Hague, looking at the allocation of green roofs.
*Results coming soon…
Team: Juliana E. Gonçalves, Chiem Kraaijvanger, Rima Arab, Trivik Verma
Juliana Gonçalves 