Cultural and heritage resilience
Cultural heritage and resource management have become even more challenging as a result of climate change. Recent research has focussed on built cultural heritage at risk from climate change events, including decay or even total loss generated by increased flooding and sea level rise, as well as water infiltration from post-flood standing water. It is apparent that human behaviour can aggravate climate impacts, for example through the emergence of "last chance tourism." A short-term spike in visitor interest and unstable economic conditions brought on by last-chance tourism may hasten the deterioration of culturally significant places already at risk from climate change.
Extreme weather conditions in the Caribbean and Pacific Small Island Developing States, where climate change has strong impacts, threaten traditional ways of life and linked components like oral traditions and performing arts. The Cordilleras Rice Terraces in the Philippines are already suffering from the effects of changing climatic conditions, and earthen architecture sites, like the Djenné mosque in Mali, are threatened by temperature and water interaction changes.
However, new data affirms the relevance of integrating indigenous and local knowledge into climate risk management methods through early warning preparedness and reaction. Such strategies become even more vital where other early warning systems are not available or resources are constrained. How people in various contexts feel about climate change directly impacts how they react and adapt to it. Interaction with indigenous and local knowledge is necessary for planning climate adaptation measures appropriate for the community. In major cities, youth, adult groups, social media, and commercial media may significantly increase climate awareness and the legitimacy of adaptive action.
Resilience to conflict
In metropolitan areas, climate change can amplify preexisting threats to human security. Adapting regional infrastructure systems that support urban life in areas of conflict or administrative tensions is difficult, for instance when parts of networked infrastructure are controlled by competing political interests. This has been observed in the water sector. Coordinating political processes is a significant challenge even for developed nations with sufficient administrative capacity. Coordination issues for urban planning are disproportionately worse in post-conflict settings.
Conflict-sensitive planning techniques to ensure participative procedures to prevent adaptation from being a polarizing activity are necessary when implementing adaptation measures in cities. Amongst politically divided communities, adaptation can help foster local collaboration and create a shared objective that transcends political divides. It might be difficult to include the longer-term perspective and engineering-technical competence for adaptation into peacebuilding programs run by the government or civil society because they are often focused on the short term and framed by socioeconomic policy.
Resilience to extreme weather events
The increased frequency and severity of extreme weather and climatic occurrences directly result from climate change. Temperature extremes like the urban heat island, floods like sea level rise, droughts, and landslides are four key climate-related environmental occurrences that significantly influence. Half of the world’s urban population in the future could be at risk from extreme heat due to a combination of natural climate variability and human-caused warming, with the most significant impact felt in the tropical Global South and coastal towns and settlements. Expanding human settlements exposes them to new wind risk levels posed by climate change threats. Even with a relatively small wind load, the high winds accompanying tropical cyclones and Derechos can cause significant structural damage to buildings and essential infrastructure and human injuries from flying debris and other climate disasters.
Building standards and guidelines, which govern architectural and urban design at the single-building scale, enable climate-responsive buildings, which can collectively alter user behaviour during extreme weather events and adapt to a changing environment. These include structures that can adapt to extreme heat and cold as well as flooding to ensure user comfort for example building on stilts and amphibian architecture. Although design standards can be changed rapidly and broadly, retrofitting old structures is expensive, thus caution must be exercised to prevent any potential harm to social fairness.
Resilient health systems
Urban communities and climate change adaptation have been significantly impacted pandemics such as COVID-19. The pandemic has highlighted systematic under-investment that has led to numerous, long-lasting health vulnerabilities many of which also increase the risk from climate change as well as co-benefits for urban measures to lower the threat of pandemics and climate change in the future. The effects of pandemics such as COVID-19 and climate change are made worse by growing societal inequality. By addressing the root causes of social vulnerability, transformative adaptation is made possible.