Urban adaptation in Europe: what works?

Cities on the frontline of climate change: the need for urban adaptation
Average temperatures across Europe are rising faster than the global average, and
Europe’s cities are feeling the impacts of climate change more regularly and more
severely. With the summer of 2023 breaking temperature records, the case for
investing in societal resilience to climate change has never been clearer.
The impacts of climate change can be even more intensely felt in urban areas due to
their morphology and their dense infrastructure and population. Increased surface
run-off during storms and heavy precipitation events makes urban areas particularly
vulnerable to flooding. The urban heat island effect can also cause surface
temperatures to be up to 10-15°C warmer in urban areas than their surroundings.
Additional and growing risks in urban areas include water scarcity and reductions
in water quality, the spread of infectious disease-carrying vectors, storms, wildfires,
landslides, and coastal flooding due to sea level rise. The sectors reported to be most
impacted by climate change in larger urban areas are water, buildings, health and
transport. If smaller municipalities are taken into account, then there are also major
impacts reported in the agriculture and forestry, environment and biodiversity, and
civil protection and emergency sectors.
There are clear indications that these impacts may increase in the future. Artificial
or sealed surfaces are widespread in urban areas and can exacerbate the risk of
localised flooding. The overall proportion of sealed land in Europe has already
increased by over 6% since 2000. Meanwhile, an estimated 26.9% of urban areas saw
a significant (>10%) increase in population living within existing floodplains between
2011 and 2021. The urgency to take action will only increase, and there is a need to
rapidly upscale what is already seen to work in cities. Importantly, this means that
adaptation actions undertaken now will need to not only address the local impacts
of climate change which are already happening, but they will also have to protect
against the additional, greater impacts foreseen in the future.
The need for urban adaptation aligns with the equally urgent need to shift to more
sustainable ways of living. The triple crises of climate change, biodiversity loss
and pollution are interlinked and reinforcing, and largely driven by our currently
unsustainable production and consumption systems. As such, there is much that
can already be done to transition to more sustainable practices, and this is a call to
action. With three quarters of Europe’s population estimated to live in urban areas,
cities have the responsibility, but also the capacity, to be true drivers of change.
Local adaptation actions aim to increase the overall resilience of urban systems,
taking into account that there are inequalities both in the way that different
population groups are affected by climate change and also in how they may benefit
from any adaptation actions taken. Adaptation is required across all sectors and at
all governance levels, with upscaling of local action urgently needed.

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