Climate change is here, and our urban areas are ill-prepared. In July 2022, the West Midlands experienced temperatures surpassing 38°C, leading to overheating in residences and care facilities, school shutdowns, travel disruptions, data server malfunctions, a rise in fire emergencies, and water safety issues, among other consequences. Additionally, flash flooding from intense rainfall is a common occurrence, resulting in road closures, traffic congestion, inundated homes and businesses, sewage overflows onto streets, and the cancellation of events. As extreme weather events become more frequent and severe, the health and socio-economic repercussions will escalate without climate adaptation.

Across the UK, there is an urgent need for adaptation action to safeguard urban areas and their inhabitants, especially those in vulnerable communities who are most affected by health and economic challenges. However, in the Climate Change Committee’s 2023 assessment of the Third National Adaptation Programme (NAP3 – designed to make the UK resilient to future climate change) they report that “adaptation is still not sufficiently well-understood or resourced, particularly in local government”. While some authorities have developed adaptation plans, either historically (circa 2014-2016, under a now-defunct policy) or more recently, the implementation of these plans is inconsistent. Furthermore, the focus on mitigation and achieving net-zero emissions often overshadows climate adaptation. There is also a lack of standardised guidance for authorities and partner organisations on how to incorporate adaptation into their decision-making processes. Moreover, recent work with citizens in the West Midlands revealed that while communities recognise the reality of extreme weather and generally accept the existence of human-induced climate change, there is confusion around the difference between mitigation and adaptation, and limited awareness of the pressing need to adapt.

In recent years, a team at the University of Birmingham on the WM-Air project have been working with Birmingham City Council, and the broader West Midlands Combined Authority (WMCA) to understand how climate risk and vulnerability varies across their municipality and region. Initially, we developed a Climate Risk and Vulnerability Assessment (CRVA) for Birmingham City Council. The CRVA uses a GIS-based approach to pull together different environmental, physical, and socio-economic data layers to understand how climate risk and vulnerability varies across the city. It combines information on flood risk, access to green space, overheating risk, air pollution, and vulnerability indicators such as the Indices of Multiple Deprivation and Excess Years Life Lost to create a combined score for climate risk and vulnerability. The approach and the datasets are open access, so that others may copy this approach. The resultant map for Birmingham is available on the city website.

Having a CRVA helps the city increase climate resilience, by:

• raising the profile of climate adaptation within local authority processes, e.g. planning, urban forestry.
• understanding how climate risk and vulnerability varies across the city, at a range of scales, e.g. development-scale, Lower Super Output Areas, Wards, to support decisions at these scales.
• understanding how prospective developments can alter climate risk and vulnerability, to ensure climate positive development.
• supporting the application to the international Carbon Disclosure Project (CDP). Being on the CDP list demonstrates transparency and bold climate action, and the list is a means to celebrate the achievements, vision, and commitment of these cities in the fight against climate change. Indeed, in 2023 Birmingham was rated an A grade city for climate action.

Birmingham is now working with a series of metropolitan areas across Europe, as part of the CARMINE project, which is sharing best practice in climate modelling, policy, and nature-based solutions across eight metropolitan areas to develop climate-resilience development pathways.

More recently we have been working with WMCA to develop two CRVAs for the broader region and its seven constituent local authorities. The first, like that developed for Birmingham, considers the climate risk and vulnerabilities for communities. The second, a transport-CRVA, was developed with Transport for West Midlands, and considers the climate risks and vulnerabilities associated with the regional transport networks including roads, railways, tramways, bus routes and cycleways. These maps will shortly be available from the WMCA webpages and are underpinning adaptation planning in the region. We have also developed a series of graphics to explain climate adaptation and the CRVA mapping process to a range of different stakeholders, including community groups. This is helping us raise awareness about climate impacts and the need to adapt. We have also shared the transport-CRVA work with a group of international transport experts at a recent UNECE Inland Transport session.

Looking forwards, housebuilding remains high on the political agenda. New homes and developments must be designed for future weather and climate, otherwise we will continue to widen the adaptation gap. For example, new residential constructions and developments need to be designed to withstand the increased risk of overheating due to the hotter summers anticipated from climate change. Additionally, these projects should incorporate strategies for managing water as a resource to help mitigate the flood risks linked to intense rainfall. Incorporating green spaces and trees is crucial for enhancing urban resilience; trees offer shade during warm weather and help cool nearby areas through the process of evapotranspiration. Furthermore, trees, hedgerows and planted embankments play a vital role in intercepting rainfall and can be integrated into sustainable urban drainage systems or alongside linear transport infrastructure to help alleviate flood risks. Such nature-based solutions also work to address the biodiversity crisis. There is no single solution to adapting our urban areas to climate change, but by raising awareness of the need to adapt, and working together to create collective responsibility, we can increase urban climate resilience.