Measuring Urban Resilience to Climate Change in Three Chinese Cities

Mingshun Zhang, Yaguang Yang, Huanhuan Li and Meine Pieter van Dijk
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Mingshun Zhang: Beijing Climate Change Response Research and Education Centre, Beijing University of Civil Engineering and Architecture, Beijing 100044, China
Yaguang Yang: Beijing Climate Change Response Research and Education Centre, Beijing University of Civil Engineering and Architecture, Beijing 100044, China
Huanhuan Li: Beijing Climate Change Response Research and Education Centre, Beijing University of Civil Engineering and Architecture, Beijing 100044, China
Meine Pieter van Dijk: Maastricht School of Management (MSM), 6229 EP Maastricht, The Netherlands

Sustainability, 2020, vol. 12, issue 22, 1-18

Abstract: Building an urban resilience index results in developing an increasingly popular tool for monitoring progress towards climate-proof cities. This paper develops an urban resilience index in the context of urban China, which helps planners and policy-makers at city level to identify whether urban development is leading to more resilience. The urban resilience index (URI) suggested in this research uses data on 24 indicators distributed over six URI component indices. While no measure of such a complex phenomenon can be perfect, the URI proved to be effective, useful and robust. Our findings show that the URI ensures access to integrated information on urban resilience to climate change. It allows comparisons of cities in a systematic and quantitative way, and enables identification of strong and weak points related to urban resilience. The URI provides tangible measures of not only overall measures of urban resilience to climate change, but also urban resilience components and related indicators. Therefore, it could meet a wide range of policy and research needs. URI is a helpful tool for urban decision-makers and urban planners to quantify goals, measure progress, benchmark performance, and identify priorities for achieving high urban resilience to climate change.

Keywords: urban resilience; resilience assessment; hazards management; climate change; urban governance (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: O13 Q Q0 Q2 Q3 Q5 Q56 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2020
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (6)

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