technological advancement has led to a clearer understanding of future risks and impacts. With increasing urbanization, understanding the impacts of climate change upon the urban environment will become ever more important. Evidence is mounting that climate change presents unique challenges for urban areas and their growing populations. Where urban areas grow rapidly without regard to current a...

Urban physical environments will face up to the challenges posed by global climate change. Various software packages for urban environmental simulation have been created to aid predictions of design performance under climate change conditions as understood today. However, the outputs from these simulation packages present great difficulties for planners, architects and urban designers working i...

ion, and the like. The science of climate change and its impacts is very uncertain, though this does not distinguish it from the science of water and sanitation. A more obvious distinction is that whereas progress on water and sanitation is often inhibited by a tendency to turn to outdated models of improvement, progress on adaptation to climate change is inhibited by the lack of models to turn...

The environmental dimension of spatial planning in emerging Asian megacities such as Ho Chi Minh City (HCMC) has become a strong rationale for coordinating spatially well defined adaptation actions and integrating mitigation policies. Climate change is changing the traditional context of urban development planning and is shaping the priorities of sustainability. While urban development trends i...

Abstract Urban climate insurgency refers to the ensemble of grassroots initiatives aiming tackle change from a radical point view. Insurgency in this case does not imply violence but rather rejection current socioecological system. While explicitly challenging planetary ecocide and climate-change effects, these forms target all policies that make urban condition yet more precarious, demonstrati...

In a companion paper, the authors presented a formulation and evaluation of an urban parameterization designed to represent the urban energy balance in the Community Land Model. Here the robustness of the model is tested through sensitivity studies and the model’s ability to simulate urban heat islands in different environments is evaluated. Findings show that heat storage and sensible heat flu...

The Yangtze River Delta (YRD) has experienced rapid urbanization and dramatic economic development since 1978 and the Yangtze River Delta urban agglomeration (YRDUA) has been one of the three largest urban agglomerations in China. We present evidence of a significant urban heat island (UHI) effect on climate warming based on an analysis of the impacts of the urbanization rate, urban population,...

Progress in urban climate science is severely restricted by the lack of useful information that describes aspects of the form and function of cities at a detailed spatial resolution. To overcome this shortcoming we are initiating an international effort to develop the World Urban Database and Access Portal Tools (WUDAPT) to gather and disseminate this information in a consistent manner for urba...

This paper describes the research results in the development of spatial indicators for assessing both climate risks and opportunities for the southern Vietnamese city of Ho Chi Minh City (HCMC). The assessment is based upon a shared spatial framework, utilising an urban structure type approach. The key urban environmental impact indicator of imperviousness is provided as an example. The propose...