A Conceptual Model for Water-Related Climate-Induced Urban Stressors

Climate change influences metropolitan areas due to multiple environmental stressors, such as regionally differentiated temperature and evapotranspiration increases, sea level rise and changes in precipitation pattern. At the same time, increasing urbanization, growing social-spatial differentiation and demographic change entail additional risks to the urban system. The joint effects of these climate and social dynamics as well as their complex feedbacks determine the vulnerability of urban areas and pose a great challenge in simulating human-environment interactions. With the goals of sustainability and adaptation in mind, this paper presents a conceptual model for urban systems focusing on multiple climate change induced water-related vulnerabilities. By taking into account exposures, urban ecology, land-use/morphology, social vulnerabilities and governance modes, the model seeks to meet the increasing demand for analyzing multiple water-related urban stressors that consider human-environment relations. This is a first step towards a complex integrated modeling framework for urban system dynamics of water-related urban changes to generate possible sustainable adaptation scenarios. The paper presents the outline of the conceptual model and discusses the selected stressors as well as their multi-way relations to urban variables in context with the target value: sustainable adaptation scenarios for urban areas.

Acknowledgement

The research is funded by the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG, German Research Foundation) under Germany’s Excellence Strategy – EXC 2037 ‘Climate, Climatic Change, and Society’ – Project Number: 390683824, and contributes to the Center for Earth System Research and Sustainability (CEN) of the Universität Hamburg.