Climate adaptation and resilience in urban and rural communities

Wildfires are becoming one of the defining climate-related crises of the twenty-first century. We argue that their inclusion in the Loss & Damage framework of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change is essential to support prevention, recovery and justice for the most affected communities.

The lived experiences of the full diversity of people facing climate change must be taken into account for climate adaptation to be effective and to avoid maladaptation.

Livelihood diversification, early warning systems, and community partnership and collaborative engagement emerge as key multi-sectoral adaptation solutions to climate change risks in mountain regions, according to the systematic analysis of 118 empirical studies.

Homeowners are more likely to take flood adaptation measures after experiencing damage, mainly when supported by insurance, and this effect weakens with extreme damage, according to an analysis that uses survey data from 719 flooded homeowners in the Netherlands, Belgium, and Germany.

This study investigates wildfire protection disparities in California, finding that disadvantaged communities have greater destruction risk. Lower rates of residential roof renewals in disadvantaged communities are a contributing factor.

Flood adaptation policies are effective at reducing overall losses from flooding. By leveraging deep generative models, this work reveals new evidence from the US that the benefits are spread disproportionately across communities.

In China, the 2021 Henan flood event led to an increase in citizen demands for drainage, neighborhood safety, and flood prevention, calling for concrete and localized state-led adaptation, according to an analysis combining a statistical approach and a neural topic modeling approach.

Projects are not delivering the transformative change needed for climate change adaptation. This failure is due in part to the delivery of adaptation as projects, but there are viable alternatives that can better address the underlying and structural causes of vulnerability.

This study maps individual trees across 54 African cities to examine the relationship between tree cover and urban informality. The findings highlight a shortage of green infrastructure in informal settlements and the need for data-driven strategies to integrate trees into future urban development.

Urban development policies, designed to improve city resilience, could unintentionally increase the exposure to climate risk. This Comment discusses the impact of misaligned incentives, miscalculated benefits and costs, and overlooked behavioural responses on policy outcomes, as well as future directions.

Aridification threatens over 2.3 billion people by reshaping landscapes and increasing socio-economic vulnerabilities, demanding immediate policy actions and global cooperation to enhance resilience and develop transformative solutions.

While adaptation to climate and environmental impacts is assumed for future development, this Perspective provides evidence that adaptation may be more limited or even undermined by climate change, requiring difficult societal decisions to be made.

This study performs a systematic review of empirical evidence for climate change adaptation in coastal cities around the world. It found that reported adaptation is mostly slow, narrow, and not transformative as coastal cities predominantly focus their adaptation on past and current challenges, and not future scenarios of risk.

This study addresses the limitations and constraints of flood adaptation. These limits could result in a growing ‘adaptation gap’ (the difference between actual and desirable flood risk), leading to unbearable risks and pushing communities in flood zones into retreat.