City Preparedness For The Climate Crisis

Exploring the ways that contemporary urban life takes the Holocene for granted, this multidisciplinary book warns that anthropogenic environmental impacts are on course to challenge the viability of most human settlements. It highlights how, despite increased warnings, most cities appear to be in denial of the potential impending catastrophes and remain ill-prepared to handle major disruptions.

Whilst it is impossible to make resistant urban growth, resilience is becoming more widely accepted and urban systems must be resilient enough to cope with the climate related hazards. This book highlights the issues of resilience through regional, national, city and community-based studies.

'Climate Resilient Cities: A Primer on Reducing Vulnerabilities to Disasters' provides city administrators with exactly what they need to know about the complex and compelling challenges of climate change. The book helps local governments create training, capacity building, and capital investment programs for building sustainable, resilient communities. A step-by-step self-assessment challenges policymakers to think about the resources needed to combat natural disasters through an innovative hot spot risk and vulnerability identifi cation tool. This primer is unique from other resources in its treatment of climate change using a dual-track approach that integrates both mitigation (lowering contributions to greenhouse gases) and adaptation (preparing for impacts of climate change) with disaster risk management. The book is relevant both to cities that are just beginning to think about climate change as well as those that already have well established policies, institutions, and strategies in place. By providing a range of city-level examples of sound practices around the world, the book demonstrates that there are many practical actions that cities can take to build resilience to climate change and natural disasters.

'Climate Resilient Cities' is the first tool of its kind for city governments to better understand how to plan for climate change impacts and impending natural disasters through sound urban planning.

The climate has changed and communities across America are living with the consequences: rapid sea level rise, multi-state wildfires, heat waves, and enduring drought. Living with Climate Change: How Communities Are Surviving and Thriving in a Changing Climate details the steps cities are taking now to protect lives and businesses, to reduce their vulnerability, and to adapt and make themselves more resilient. The authors included in this book have been directly involved in the successful design and implementation of community-based adaptation and resilience programs. In this book, they apply decades of combined experience in hazard risk reduction, climate change adaptation, and environmental protection to provide timely and practical advice on how to plan for and live with a climate that is changing faster and more erratically than predicted. The book also examines obstacles to local, state, and national action on climate change, includes case studies to illustrate smart, effective policies and practices that have already been put in place, and defines how these actions benefit the economy, the environment, and public health. Living with Climate Change provides much-needed guidance for finding and enacting solutions to immediate and future risks of climate change.

Scientists predict the earth is facing 40-to-60 years of climate change, even if emissions of carbon dioxide and other global warming gases stopped today. One inevitable consequence of the greenhouse gases already in the atmosphere will be an increase in the frequency and severity of natural disaster events. Global Warming, Natural Hazards, and Eme

This book presents the latest research on resilience strategies around the world. Research such as this is necessary to create new ideas and to evaluate established ones in an effort to make communities more adaptable and to increase people's survival and quality of life while living with the reality of climate change. The book offers definitions of resilience and various ways of measuring it, since resilience is still a concept in transition. It also describes general strategies for increasing communities’ resilience at multiple levels, then dives into specific dimensions of resilience, tying it to energy infrastructure and systems and public health.

Climate Change, Disaster Risk, adn the Urban Poor analyzes the key challenges facing the urban poor, given the risks associated with climate change and disasters. Through evidence and case studies from a number of cities--such as Dar es Salaam, Jakarta, Mexico City, and Sa̋o Paulo--the book identifies key strategies are based on difficult policy decisions that must balance tradeoffs among risk reduction, urban development, and poverty reduction. Policy makers, researchers, practitioners, and students will find the book's analysis robust and comprehensive, and abundant with global examples of policies and programs that have been implemented at the city level--including a review of financing options for local governments.