Arcadia
Adaptation and Resilience in Cities: Analysis and Decision making using Integrated Assessment
This project undertakes system-scale modelling of the inter-relationships between climate impacts, the urban economy, land use, transport and the built environment to enable the design of cities that are more resilient and adaptable. The case study for the project is the London region. ARCADIA is a consortium project led by the Tyndall Centre at Newcastle University, and CASA’s role is to develop the land use transport modelling project tasks.
Urban areas are concentrations of vulnerability to climate change. Examples of include excessive heat, water scarcity and flooding. Whilst it is impossible to attribute individual extreme events to climate change, recent events including the 2003 heat wave that struck Paris and other European cities and hurricane Katrina in New Orleans have illustrated the potential for large scale weather-related disruption of urban function, from which it may take months or years to recover.
The land use transport modelling task uses scenarios of economic and demo- graphic growth as input to a land use transport model to predict the future residential and employment geography of London. This allows the identification of concentrations of vulnerability and quantification of impacts of climate events, as illustrated in the diagram below. The diagram also shows the feedbacks modelled between climate scerarios and the urban economy.
The ARCADIA project is highly interdisciplinary and involves input from an influential group of stakeholders from business and local and central government, with interests in planning, infrastructure, the built environment and climate change adaptation and mitigation. The final research task will, working with stakeholders, use the new understanding of the vulnerability of urban systems to analyse how adaptation of urban areas can enhance resilience over a range of timescales. The objective will be to make practical proposals for ‘adaptation pathways’ for cities over the 21st Century to respond strategically to the challenges of flooding, water scarcity and extremes of heat.