This section of the essay outlines the risk and danger that climate change poses to urban settings. The section posits that the two major threats to urban settings that climate change poses are the increased risk of natural disasters and elevated levels of strain on existing infrastructure. The looming threat of climate change is elevated by the lack of attention that policy makers tend to allocate towards sustainable projects and initiatives. The article suggests that this is due to the nature of natural disasters and other climate-driven risks. Most policy makers tend to put more emphasis on shorter term issues relating to infrastructure and services rather than the larger but more insidious problem of global warming because of public reception. Because of this, the paper highlights a distinction between natural disaster prevention initiatives and climate change initiatives and states that because of the similar nature of these efforts the convergence of the two is necessary to properly address the issue. According to the article, the need to systematically address climate-driven threats is paramount to combatting global warming. These threats are divided into three categories: Hazards, adaptive capacity, and vulnerability. Hazards refer to the things such as natural disasters, rising sea levels, and other environmental events that threaten infrastructure. Vulnerability, as one might expect, refers to the susceptibility of a location to climate-driven damage and how prepared that location is to assess that damage. These factors include the topography of a given area, its GDP, etc. The article then proceeds to list collected data in a variety of locations related to the assessment of climate-driven threats. The article is both concise and broad in nature. it outlines the mechanisms behind how societies address both climate change and natural disasters and gives the reader a lot of insight into how actual efforts to combat global warming might function.
