Building Urban Climate Resilience: Experiences from Vulnerability Assessment in Hue City, Viet Nam

Abstract

Urban areas are particularly vulnerable to the impacts of climate change. This is due to the dependence on infrastructure, and the density of population, services and economic activity. Most cities have been developed, designed and built to cope with the historic climate, not the future climate trends and extremes. Moreover, cities’ increasingly sophisticated and interdependent supply chains and transportation logistics, for water, energy, workforce, food and consumables make it harder to assess the cities’ vulnerabilities. These characteristics further compound climate risks and create greater susceptibility to disruption. There is no agreed method for assessing urban vulnerability to climate change. This chapter argues that to overcome this constraint and to make the concept of vulnerability operational one should use a resilience approach that allows for consideration of complex systems, and from this, look at interactions between key systems of the cities. This chapter present a process and key findings from Hue city climate vulnerability assessment, in which climate change was not used as the starting point for the vulnerability assessment, instead, we have started with urbanization, and then factored in climate change into the process. We also looked more at urbanization as a process of change, rather than just the city as an administrative unit.