Editing IPCC:AR6/WGII/Chapter-6 (section)

=== FAQ 6.1 | Why and how are cities, settlements and different types of infrastructure especially vulnerable to the impacts of climate change? ===

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''Cities, settlements and infrastructure become vulnerable when investment decisions fail to take the risks of climate change fully into account. Such failures can result from a lack of understanding, competing priorities, a lack of finance or access to appropriate technology. Around the world, smaller cities and poorer populations are often most vulnerable and suffer the most over time, while large cities can register the greatest losses to individual events.''

The world is urban. Billions of people live in towns and cities. Hardly anyone, even in remote rural locations, is separated from the flows of trade that connect the world and are held together by networks of transport and communication infrastructure systems. Connected networks once broken can cascade out, multiplying impacts across urban and rural areas. When major manufacturing centres or regionally important ports are impacted, global trade suffers. For example, flooding in Bangkok in 2011 led to a global shortage in semiconductors and a slowdown in global computer manufacturing.

Despite cities generating wealth, additional vulnerability to climate change is being created in urban areas every day. Demographic change, social and economic pressures, and governance failures that drive inequality and marginality mean that increasing numbers of people who live in towns and cities are exposed to flooding, temperature extremes and water or food insecurity. This leads to an adaptation gap, where rich neighbourhoods can afford strategies to reduce vulnerability while poorer communities are unable to do the same. Although this would be so even without a changing climate, climate change increases the variability and extremes of weather, exposing more people, businesses and buildings to floods and other events. The combination of rising vulnerability and increasing exposure translates to a growth in the number of people and properties at risk from climate change in cities worldwide.

Around the world, vulnerability is rising but differs considerably between and within urban areas. Settlements of up to 1 million people are the most rapidly expanding and also among the most vulnerable. These settlements often have limited community level organisation and might not have a dedicated local government. Coping with rapid population growth under conditions of climate change and constrained capacity is a major challenge. For large cities, multiple local governments and well-organised community-based organisations interact with large businesses and national political parties in a complicated cocktail of interests that can interfere with planning and action to reduce vulnerability.

For the poorest living in urban slums, informal settlements or renting across the city, lack of secure tenure and inadequate access to basic services compound vulnerability. But even the wealthy in large cities are not fully protected from climate change-related shocks. Just like breaks in infrastructure between towns and rural settlements, big city infrastructure can be broken by even local landslides, floods or temperature events, with consequences cascading across the city. Electricity blackouts are the most common and can affect water pumping, traffic regulation and streetlights, as well as hospitals, schools and homes. Still, it is the urban poor and marginalised who experience the greatest exposure, most vulnerability and least capacity to cope.

Rounds of exposure and impact can reduce the capacity of survivors to cope with future events. As a result, the already vulnerable and exposed become more vulnerable over time, increasing urban inequalities. But this need not be the case. Focussing on vulnerability reduction is not easy, it requires joined-up action across social and economic development sectors, together with critical infrastructure planning. It often also means partnering local government with informal and community-based actors. But there is considerable experience globally on what works and how to deliver reduced vulnerability for the urban poor and for cities as a whole. The challenge is to scale up this experience and accelerate its application to keep pace with climate change and address the adaptation gap.

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