Impacts and Evaluation of Climate Change on the Urban Environment

Urban areas are already remarkable concentrations of climate vulnerability and projected rates of urban growth mean that vulnerability will increase at the same time as the impacts of climate change become increasingly manifest. Cities are complex and whilst impacts studies have been able to calculate the aggregate impacts of climate change, understanding where key vulnerabilities lie is much less advanced in scientific terms. Neither the effects of the urban landscape nor the heat released by human activities within cities are considered in standard climate change projections, but these have been shown to be potentially very significant. Furthermore, the science and practice of adaptation of the built environment to climate change is still in its infancy. For climate change adaptation strategies to be developed for cities and regions in the South Korea, there is therefore an urgent need for decision support tools to appraise and design adaptation options. The rationale behind this proposal is that successful adaptation requires good impact assessment tools for adaptation appraisal of the urban and city environments under a range of climate scenarios. The RCP and PRECIS QUMP scenarios provided new probabilistic downscaled climate model outputs. Some interesting features of the data are discussed such as the Manchester UHI being comparable to that of Ulsan and that it is increasing. There is now need to develop tools that enable the benefits of these outputs to be used in decision making and to demonstrate their use in practice.