The changing climate has an effect on the quality of life in our cities: heavier rainfall (resulting infloodings), longer periods of drought, reduced air and water quality and increasing temperatures incities (heat stress). Awareness about these changes among various stakeholders is of greatimportance. Every Dutch region is required to perform a stresstest indicating the effects of climatechange (o.a. flooding and heatstress) before 2020. The level of execution, area size and level ofparticipation of stakeholders, has intentionally been made flexible.To provide more insight into the approaches and best management practices to climate resilience,this article provides 3 examples of stresstests performed on several levels: single object real estatelevel, city level and national district level. The method ‘stresstestíng’, involves flood and heatstressmodeling, defines the current status of climate adaptation characteristics of an object, city or district.The stresstest form the base line and starting point for the national 3 step approach adaptationstrategy ‘analyse, ambition and action’.The 3 pilots have been evaluated as ‘successful’ by stakeholders and yielded a significant amount ofvaluable information, further improvement is recommended as increasing the participation of theprivate sector, in a ‘quadruple helix approach’. The learning points from these 3 examples ofstresstests will subsequently be implemented in the form of improved stresstesting in the nearfuture in (inter)national cities around the world.
Cities are becoming increasingly vulnerable for climate change and there is an urgent needto become more resilient. This research involves the development of the City climate scanRotterdam (September 2017) methodology to measure, map, scan and assess differentparameters that together give insight in the vulnerability of urban areas and neighborhoods.The research at recent City climate scan / Sketch your city in April 2018 used storytelling andsketching1 as main method to connect stakeholders, motivate action, evoke recognition in ajointly formulated goal, such as taking climate action. The city climate scan also involved thedevelopment of a set of measurement tools that can be applied in different urbanneighborhoods in a low-cost low-tech approach with teams of stakeholders andpractitioners. The city climate scan method was tested in different cities around the globe(Rotterdam, Manila and Cebu) in groups of young professionals and stakeholders in rapidurban appraisals.
Urban planning will benefit from tools that can assess the vulnerabilityto thermal stress in urban dense cities. Detailed quick-scan heat stressmaps, as made in this study for Johannesburg, have proven valuable inthe decision-making process on this topic. It raised awareness on theurgent need to implement measures to tackle the effects of climatechange and urbanization. Awareness on heat stress has led to theimplementation of measures to mitigate the effects of climate change.As in other countries, nature-based solutions (e.g. green roofs and walls,swales, rain gardens, planting trees etc) are considered in urban areasin South Africa for various reasons. The awareness of the effect ofnature based solutions on heat stress is still low, which can be improvedby the use of heat stress maps. Some of these measures are alreadymapped on the open source web tool, Climate-scan(www.climatescan.nl) for international knowledge exchange aroundthe globe.
