Conceptual Frameworks for Assessing Climate Change Effects on Urban Areas: A Scoping Review

Urban areas are amongst the most adversely affected regions by current and future climate change effects. One issue when it comes to measuring, for example, impacts, vulnerabilities, and resilience in preparation of adaptation action is the abundance of conceptual frameworks and associated definitio...

Full description

Saved in:
Bibliographic Details
Published in:Sustainability 2021-10, Vol.13 (19), p.10794
Main Authors: Klopfer, Florian, Westerholt, René, Gruehn, Dietwald
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Adaptation
Bibliometrics
Case studies
Climate change
Climate effects
Comparative studies
Cultural heritage
Documents
Environmental assessment
Greenhouse effect
Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change
Literature reviews
Low income groups
Population
Sustainability
Systematic review
Trends
Urban areas
Citations: Items that this one cites
Items that cite this one
Online Access:Get full text
Tags: Add Tag
No Tags, Be the first to tag this record!
Description
Summary:Urban areas are amongst the most adversely affected regions by current and future climate change effects. One issue when it comes to measuring, for example, impacts, vulnerabilities, and resilience in preparation of adaptation action is the abundance of conceptual frameworks and associated definitions. Frequently, those definitions contradict each other and shift over time. Prominently, in the transition from the IPCC AR (International Panel on Climate Change Assessment Report) 4 to the IPCC AR 5, a number of conceptual understandings have changed. By integrating common concepts, the literature review presented intends to thoroughly investigate frameworks applied to assess climate change effects on urban areas, creating an evidence base for research and politically relevant adaptation. Thereby, questions concerning the temporal development of publication activity, the geographical scopes of studies and authors, and the dominant concepts as applied in the studies are addressed. A total of 50 publications is identified following screening titles, abstracts, and full texts successively based on inclusion and exclusion criteria. Major findings derived from our literature corpus include a recently rising trend in the number of publications, a focus on Chinese cities, an imbalance in favor of authors from Europe and North America, a dominance of the concept of vulnerability, and a strong influence of the IPCC publications. However, confusion regarding various understandings remains. Future research should focus on mainstreaming and unifying conceptual frameworks and definitions as well as on conducting comparative studies.
ISSN:2071-1050
2071-1050
DOI:10.3390/su131910794