Indicators and monitoring systems for urban climate resiliency
- PDF / 1,305,053 Bytes
- 23 Pages / 439.37 x 666.142 pts Page_size
- 103 Downloads / 206 Views
Indicators and monitoring systems for urban climate resiliency William Solecki 1
& Cynthia Rosenzweig
2
Received: 25 November 2019 / Accepted: 25 November 2020/ # The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Nature B.V. part of Springer Nature 2020
Abstract
Cities in the USA and around the world have begun to take an active role in responding to climate change. A central requirement for effective urban climate strategies is the capacity to understand and measure how the climate is changing, the physical, environmental, and social impacts of the changes, and whether adaptation and resiliency policies and programs put in place in response are working. The objective of this paper is to review and assess how urban climate change and resiliency efforts can be measured and to define what might serve as meaningful indicator and monitoring protocols. The New York City Panel on Climate Change (NPCC) is used as a case study along with a reviews of the emerging literature of urban climate change indicators to analyze the requirements and processes needed for a successful urban climate resiliency indicator and monitoring (I and M) system. In the paper, the basic requirements of a proposed Urban Climate Resilience Indicators and Monitoring System are presented. A specific illustration of an I and M system for tracking the urban heat island highlights challenges as well as potential solutions embedded within such systems. Discussions how these protocols can be translated to other locales and settings, as well as the relationship to the US National Climate Assessment indicator process, are presented. Keywords New York City Panel on Climate Change . Urban Climate Resilience Indicators and Monitoring System . Climate assessment
This article is part of a Special Issue on “National Indicators of Climate Changes, Impacts, and Vulnerability” edited by Anthony C. Janetos and Melissa A. Kenney.
* William Solecki [email protected]
1
Department of Geography and Environmental Science, Hunter College – City University of New York, New York City, NY, USA
2
NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies, New York, NY, USA
Climatic Change
1 Introduction A key challenge for US cities as they begin to respond to climate change impacts is how to measure, monitor, and evaluate critical climate change indicators. A tracking system for urban climate indicators is an important tool for decision-makers to help them plan climate change responses and timelines and to communicate with the general public about growing risks and the need for such decisions. By monitoring trends, for example, in coastal flooding, decisionmakers and scientists can be cognizant of approaching “tipping points” in regard to systemlevel thresholds and act as decision triggers for strengthening adaptation measures (Solecki et al. 2015a, b). Creation of an effective indicators and monitoring (I and M) system involves not only defining key climate variables and impacts but also the tracking of adaptation and resiliency measures. Effective indicators are based on
Data Loading...
