An integrated framework to streamline resilience in the context of urban climate risk assessment

Abstract

Cities are increasingly acknowledged as crucial when facing climate change—and the environmental crisis more in general—, offering challenges and opportunities in terms of both mitigation and adaptation. Climate change-sensitive urban governance requires proactive, integrated, and contextualized approaches, making room for the complex, multilayered, multiscalar, and dynamic processes constituting a city. The notion of “resilience” has been acquiring growing recognition as a flexible and powerful concept to respond to these challenges. Resilience itself, however, is also a polysemic notion, often treated as little more than a catchword or a wishful aim or superimposed with other climaterelated terms, such as risk, vulnerability, or adaptation. To promote a stronger integration among different problem-settings and epistemic communities, this paper advances six analytical distinctions aiming to provide structure and articulation to existing definitions of the concept of “resilience.” Likewise, it offers an integrated analytical framework and methodological pipeline to streamline resilience analysis in the context of urban climate risk assessment. The framework is specially defined to link up with the definition of climate risk provided by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) latest Assessment Reports and is illustrated through examples derived from the recent experience of the Chilean Climate Risk Atlas.