Neighbourhood Futures: A framework for climate resilience and health equity

Heat stress is now the leading cause of weather-related deaths around the world, and urban communities are disproportionately affected — often due to a lack of green space and a predominance of concrete structures and streets that absorb heat. This framework from Ramboll and Impact on Urban Health was designed to enable the development of more comprehensive, diverse, and locally sensitive climate-related strategies that can help you to explore vulnerabilities and embed climate resilience and health equity into urban areas. The framework sets out five complementary capacities that can be used collectively to examine local conditions, evaluate plans and strategies, and shape new projects. These include threshold capacity (understanding the spaces and individuals within communities that are the most vulnerable to extreme temperatures), coping capacity (preparing neighborhoods for extreme weather events when temperatures exceed safe thresholds), recovery capacity (enabling neighborhoods to restore livability and health by assessing the negative impacts of climate change and distributing resources to the most appropriate places), adaptive capacity (making the right changes to protect people and places from extreme hot and cold waves), and transformative capacity (reimagining systems to make neighborhoods more resilient and equitable). This resource will be of particular use to professionals working with urban planners.