The Climate Centre’s Coalition on urban climate adaptation is focused on strengthening the resilience of urban settlements to climate change and weather extremes (floods, droughts, heatwaves) through planning and governance.
The Key Challenges
Of the key challenges to be addressed the coalition is focusing on:
- How to design, implement, and evaluate policies and strategies related to urban adaptation that reduce the vulnerability of urban areas to climate and weather extremes and support a transformation to a climate resilient society.
- How to align urban policies and strategies in a way that it does not undermine the resource base of urban areas and their rural (rurban) hinterlands in order to secure sustainable development for all.
- The urban and 'rurban' planning and governance complexities involving the sectoral integration of agriculture, water, land use, energy, public health, and other critical sectors.
Our activities
The coalition is building on existing research at the UT and, in collaboration with scientific and government agencies, local governments, industry and civil society, fostering new research in response to societal needs. In the next few years the coalition will focus on urban planning and design; governance of adaptation to climate change; urban climate justice and equity; climate risk and vulnerability, stakeholder engagement in urban climate decision-making, and digital solutions for adaptation. Activities include the development of joint research projects; workshops with academic and societal partners and joint supervision of PhDs and postdoc researchers.
We are also expanding our collaboration with relevant education programmes such as the Master’s in Environmental & Energy Management and the Master’s in Geo-information Science and Earth Observation with its specialisation in urban and land futures. Activities will include joint teaching in modules/ electives, curriculum enhancement to integrate urban adaptation, and joint supervision of MSc and BSc students.
Coalition leads
