A new framework to build climate resilience in cities

The climate crisis is already having a devastating impact on people’s health, which is why I’m delighted that this week, Impact on Urban Health and Ramboll, a global engineering and sustainability consultancy, are launching Neighbourhood Futures – a new framework designed to embed climate resilience into urban areas.

Our neighbourhoods are underprepared to withstand climate change and the impact it will have on already existing patterns of health inequity we see in inner-city areas.

When temperatures increase, so do heat-related illness and deaths. During five periods of extreme heat between June and August 2022 there were 6.2% more deaths in England and Wales than the five-year average.

Extreme temperatures can impact people’s nervous, respiratory, cardiovascular and renal systems, leading to an increased risk of dehydration, heat exhaustion and heatstroke.

The challenge of climate change requires coordination across sectors – but ‘resilience’ often means different things to different organisations, making it difficult to work in a collaborative way.

With this new framework, professionals will be able to align ways to prepare neighbourhoods for climate change, whether they be housing providers, local authorities, the healthcare system, construction companies, community organisations or urban planners.

The framework sets out five distinct and complementary ways for neighbourhoods to build up resilience to climate change, by focusing on five capacities:

• Threshold capacity – understanding the spaces and individuals within communities that are the most vulnerable to extreme temperatures.
• Coping capacity – preparing neighbourhoods for extreme weather events when temperatures exceed threshold levels.
• Recovery capacity – enabling neighbourhoods to restore liveability and health by assessing the negative impacts of climate change and distributing resources to the most appropriate places.
• Adaptive capacity – making the right changes to protect people and places from extreme hot and cold waves.
• Transformative capacity – reimagining systems to make neighbourhoods more resilient and equitable.

Neighbourhood Futures allows us to take multiple perspectives towards growing resilience in urban places by focusing on the different ways communities can be vulnerable. By supporting organisations to develop strategies to look at a range of vulnerabilities, plans can be made to help neighbourhoods thrive – and not just adapt to our changing climate.

We encourage organisations to develop this framework through applying it to their circumstances, sharing findings and recommendations of how it can grow.

Get in touch with us if you’d like to work together to make sure that our neighbourhoods can meet the challenge of climate change in the most equitable way possible.