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

Abstract

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.