Cities face significant impacts fromclimate change, both now and into the future. These impactshave potentially serious consequences for human health,livelihoods, and assets, especially for the urban poor,informal settlements, and other vulnerable groups. Climatechange impacts range from an increase in extreme weatherevents and flooding to hotter temperatures and public healthconcerns. Cities in low elevation coastal zones, forinstance, face the combined threat of sea-level rise andstorm surges. The specific impacts on each city will dependon the actual changes in climate experienced (for example,higher temperatures or increased rainfall), which will varyfrom place to place. Climate change will increase thefrequency at which some natural hazards occur, especiallyextreme weather events, and introduce new incrementalimpacts that are less immediate. However, few climateimpacts will be truly unfamiliar to cities. Cities havealways lived with natural hazards, such as earthquakes,tsunamis, hurricanes, and flooding. In some situations,cities will experience an increase in the frequency ofexisting climate-related hazards, such as flooding. Climatechange considerations can be integrated with disaster riskreduction (DRR) in cities. DRR efforts already familiar tomany may be used as a platform from which to develop climatechange adaptation plans. In practical terms, disaster riskreduction and climate adaptation can be integrated in manyinstances, although cities should also consider incrementalor gradual changes in climate that affect governmentoperations or community life in less immediate and visibleways than conventional disasters. Approaches to collectinginformation on climate change impacts in a city can rangefrom highly technical and resource-intensive, to simple andinexpensive. Technically complex assessments are likely torequire collaboration with external experts, if a city isnot large or well-resourced with sufficient in-house capacity.
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