At present, urban areas are remarkable concentrations of climate vulnerability.  In the future more of the world’s population will be vulnerable due to the increasing rate of urbanisation. At the same time, the impacts of climate change on cities will manifest. Actions by planners, designers and infrastructure owners are required in the short term, if cities are to avoid becoming ever more vulnerable to climate change in the long term.

Whilst impacts studies have been able to calculate the aggregate impacts of climate change on city systems, understanding where their key vulnerabilities lie is much less advanced in scientific terms. Both the effects of the urban landscape, and the heat released by human activities within cities are potentially very significant , but rarely considered in standard climate change projections. Furthermore, the science and practice of adaptation of the built environment to climate change is still in its infancy.

There is an urgent need to develop decision support tools to appraise and design adaptation options in order to design appropriate climate change adaptation strategies for cities and regions in the UK.

The rationale behind this proposal is that successful adaptation requires good impact assessment tools. These tools need to be able assess the impacts of policy options on urban and city environments under a range of climate scenarios. SCORCHIO therefore straddles the two priority areas in the EP SRC, namely:

The research is divided into three interacting Work Packages (WPs).

WP1 develops new climate scenarios specifically for urban impacts and adaptation studies, based upon a methodology consistent with UK Climate Impacts Programme (UKCIP) but uniquely accounting for urban landscape effects and anthropogenic heat sources.

WP2 develops new methods for assessing the effects of a hotter climate in urban areas and for appraising adaptation options. It also calculates the emissions and energy implications of different building adaptation options.

WP3 synthesises the results in two GIS-based decision support tools operating at the scale of whole cities and buildings/streets respectively. The work is demonstrated through collaboration on case studies with stakeholders in Manchester and Sheffield. The city-scale assessment will be made available to Tyndall colleagues working on a London project.

This work is still underway and results are not yet available.

Sheffield City Council
Andy Nolan (Head of Environmental Strategy), tel. +44 (0)114 7815958104

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Prof Geoff Levermore, Tyndall Centre, The University of Manchester

research

Urban Policy > Urban environment

Environmental sustainability