Urban areas are being forced to respond to climate changes due to two simple facts:
- Urban areas have large and growing populations that for many reasons are highly vulnerable to variability in climate, and
- Cities depend on a huge set of interrelated infrastructures and the resources that support them. These resources often come from rural regions at great distance from the urban centers.
As a quick illustration of the second point, electricity is essential to almost all the infrastructures and a failure in the electrical grid can affect water treatment and supply and transportation services, among many others. Moreover, power generation is almost always far from the urban centers. So climate-related events and processes in far away locales can reverberate to impact urban residents almost instantly.
Just to be clear on the matter, here the term “infrastructure” is used in a wide sense to include systems and assets essential for national and economic security, national public health and safety, and in general, those systems needed for the overall well-being of residents of the city. These include such things as water, energy, public health, banking, communication, transportation, and food supply.
Also at risk from climate change are historic properties of the urban environment, along with cultural resources and archaeological sites.
It’s useful to summarize the key points linking urban systems and climate change:
- Infrastructure Systems— An entire nation’s well-being depends on the resilience of urban infrastructure systems. These essential infrastructures will be increasingly compromised by the impacts of climate change.
- Interdependency—Disruptions due to climate change in one infrastructure will almost certainly lead to disruptions in other infrastructures.
- Social Inequalities—Different social inequalities such as age, gender, income and health will influence the urban system’s vulnerability to climate changes.
- Adaptation—Plans for cities to adapt to climate-change related impacts on infrastructure will require cooperation between the activities of the government and the private sector. Such cooperation may be very difficult due to lower-level, conflicting interests in these two groups.