Coastal cities play a central role in the global economy and exercise important societal functions.
Coastal cities play a central role in the global economy and exercise important societal functions. At the same time, they are strongly affected by the consequences of climate change. Accordingly, they have a key part to play in global adaptation to climate change. To gain an overview of the current state of adaptation, an international team lead by LMU geographer Professor Matthias Garschagen has analyzed the published scientific evidence.
In their study, the researchers investigated whether and how the adaptation of cities addresses risk factors – such as rising sea levels, storms, floods, and heat – and the exposure and vulnerability of population, infrastructure, and ecosystems.
Adaptation Measures Worldwide
On the one hand, the results published in the journal Nature Cities show that knowledge is unevenly distributed. Many investigations are centered on cities in the Global North, while cities in the Global South receive much less attention from researchers. We need to dig deeper into the reasons for this discrepancy, says Garschagen.
Nonetheless, the researchers were able to include 199 cities from 54 countries in different income groups in their study. They discovered that adaptation measures chiefly concerned sea level rises, floods, and, to a lesser extent, storm tides, cyclones, and erosion. Technical and institutional measures such as extensive dikes or adaptations to urban planning are more common in more prosperous regions of North America and Europe, for instance, whereas behavior-related measures predominate in Africa and Asia, with affected households and companies left to their own devices.
Read more at Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München
Photo Credit: Harmanos via Pixabay
