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

Sun, Landong; Tian, Zhan; Zou, Huan; Shao, Lanzhu; Sun, Laixiang; Dong, Guangtao; Fan, Dongli; Huang, Xinxing; Frost, Laura; James, Lewis-Fox

doi:10.3390/su11072099

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

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Shanghai Climate Center, Shanghai Meteorological Bureau, Shanghai 200030, China

School of Environmental Science and Engineering, Southern University of Science and Technology, Shenzhen 518055, China

School of Finance and Management, SOAS University of London, London WC1H 0XG, UK

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Arup 13 Fitzroy Street, London W1T 4BQ, UK

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Department of Geographical Sciences, University of Maryland, College Park, MD 20742, USA

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International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis (IIASA), A-2361 Laxenburg, Austria

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Shanghai Institute of Technology, Shanghai 200235, China

Authors to whom correspondence should be addressed.

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Landong Sun and Zhan Tian contribute equally to this article.

Sustainability 2019, 11(7), 2099; https://doi.org/10.3390/su11072099

Received: 30 January 2019 / Revised: 24 March 2019 / Accepted: 4 April 2019 / Published: 9 April 2019

(This article belongs to the Special Issue Climate Change and Sustainable Development Policy)

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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. View Full-Text

Keywords: climate risk assessment; index-based; infrastructure; the Yangtze River Delta region; stakeholder perspective

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MDPI and ACS Style

Sun, L.; Tian, Z.; Zou, H.; Shao, L.; Sun, L.; Dong, G.; Fan, D.; Huang, X.; Frost, L.; James, L.-F. An Index-Based Assessment of Perceived Climate Risk and Vulnerability for the Urban Cluster in the Yangtze River Delta Region of China. Sustainability 2019, 11, 2099. https://doi.org/10.3390/su11072099

AMA Style

Sun L, Tian Z, Zou H, Shao L, Sun L, Dong G, Fan D, Huang X, Frost L, James L-F. An Index-Based Assessment of Perceived Climate Risk and Vulnerability for the Urban Cluster in the Yangtze River Delta Region of China. Sustainability. 2019; 11(7):2099. https://doi.org/10.3390/su11072099

Chicago/Turabian Style

Sun, Landong, Zhan Tian, Huan Zou, Lanzhu Shao, Laixiang Sun, Guangtao Dong, Dongli Fan, Xinxing Huang, Laura Frost, and Lewis-Fox James. 2019. "An Index-Based Assessment of Perceived Climate Risk and Vulnerability for the Urban Cluster in the Yangtze River Delta Region of China" Sustainability 11, no. 7: 2099. https://doi.org/10.3390/su11072099

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

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