Response To The Reading

The section two of the “Climate Change and Cities” focuses on how the urban areas have managed or controlled the negative influences that climate change has brought to the cities and the people living in it. This chapter teaches the reader the relationship between cities and climate. How people interact with the climate change, how people are influenced by it and how people manage the problems of climate change.

It first summarizes the four major problems that cities are going to have according to the climate change. There are “increasing heat waves”, “increasing precipitation”, “increasing drought area” and more “intense tropical cyclone activity”. It explains the reason behind each aspect and then goes on talking about how climate change can influence the human system such as productivities and so on. The chapter explains that climate change can lead to many negative effects and those effects will cause more sub negative consequences. It also talks about how the residents will be the most affected group during the climate change time period. The increasing drought will bring more water shortage and some areas will have more flooding. In order to prevent these sectoral impacts from happening or reduce the possibility of happening, the cities must create strategies. The more and more severe climate change triggered the “urban climate change adaptation”. However, since the problem of climate change is not at its worst right now, many people tend to take care of other issues and prefer to work on other issues rather than climate change strategy planning. Even though the risk reduction planning is not being focused enough, the problem itself is already not able to be neglected. Climate risk is increasing day by day and the risks in developing or low developing countries are even higher. The author states that climate change adaptation and disaster risk reduction share a lot of common grounds and have the same goal. This chapter also talks about how the climate change is involved in the disaster prevention and city planning of urban areas, and how a city assesses the risk of climate change. Then it goes on talking about the three most important factors in climate risk: hazards, vulnerability, and adaptive capacity. It talks about the definition of each and how the three factors relate to each other. This chapter also talks about the different level of effects that different types of residents and different areas of urban areas will receive. Such as the poor and the non-poor, and low elevation areas. The problems for different areas and different groups of people will be different and should be treated differently. The chapter also gives the readers specific examples of different locations and issues to let the audience have a better picture of the topic. Finally, it listed some predictions of the future climate change side effects and the risk assessment and adaptation planning that can be used.

This chapter of reading allows us to understand better the situation we are facing. It allows us to learn more about how people and climate change are tightly connected and how we should pay attention to this issue and produce even more strategy to reduce the risk of climate change.