Adaptation Strategies for Climate Change in the Urban Environment: Assessing Climate Change Related Risk in UK Urban Areas

Abstract

This paper presents a conurbation‐scale risk assessment methodology which aims to provide a screening tool to assist with planning for climate change‐related risks in the urban environment. This work has been undertaken as part of a wider, interdisciplinary project, Adaptation Strategies for Climate Change in the Urban Environment (ASCCUE). The main focus of ASCCUE is to help improve understanding of the consequences of climate change for urban areas and how these, and the neighbourhoods within them, can best be adapted. Adaptation options will be explored in the context of both conurbation‐scale strategic planning and neighbourhood‐level urban design. The paper conveys some of the initial outputs from the ASCCUE project. It firstly presents the overarching risk assessment framework, before outlining the GIS‐based elements of the methodology. This draws on a characterisation of the urban area into distinctive “urban morphology units” as the spatial framework for the analytical work. An example of heat related risk is given by way of an illustrative application of the methodology. The paper concludes with a consideration of the limitations of the approach and how some of these will be tackled as part of the ongoing work programme.