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

Landong Sun, Zhan Tian, Huan Zou, Lanzhu Shao, Laixiang Sun, Guangtao Dong, Dongli Fan, Xinxing Huang, Laura Frost and Lewis-Fox James
Additional contact information
Landong Sun: Shanghai Climate Center, Shanghai Meteorological Bureau, Shanghai 200030, China
Zhan Tian: School of Environmental Science and Engineering, Southern University of Science and Technology, Shenzhen 518055, China
Huan Zou: School of Finance and Management, SOAS University of London, London WC1H 0XG, UK
Lanzhu Shao: Arup 13 Fitzroy Street, London W1T 4BQ, UK
Laixiang Sun: School of Finance and Management, SOAS University of London, London WC1H 0XG, UK
Guangtao Dong: Shanghai Climate Center, Shanghai Meteorological Bureau, Shanghai 200030, China
Dongli Fan: Shanghai Institute of Technology, Shanghai 200235, China
Xinxing Huang: Shanghai Institute of Technology, Shanghai 200235, China
Laura Frost: Arup 13 Fitzroy Street, London W1T 4BQ, UK
Lewis-Fox James: Arup 13 Fitzroy Street, London W1T 4BQ, UK

Sustainability, 2019, vol. 11, issue 7, 1-15

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.

Keywords: climate risk assessment; index-based; infrastructure; the Yangtze River Delta region; stakeholder perspective (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: O13 Q Q0 Q2 Q3 Q5 Q56 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2019
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (5)

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