The Heat is On: A Scenario-based Resilience Framework to Capture Community and Planning Perceptions and Priorities for Urban Heat

Resilience assessments are central to urban climate planning, yet when they fail to capture societal perceptions, uncertainties, and contested priorities, they risk producing strategies that lack legitimacy or misalign with public needs. These challenges are exacerbated by extreme heat, a deadly hazard that remains abstract to many residents and planners. This study develops a framework combining public surveys with two rounds of stakeholder surveys to link public concerns with institutional decision-making for heat resilience.

The framework comprises four phases: (i) scoping and stakeholder mapping; (ii) public surveys using hypothetical but plausible extreme heat scenarios to capture personal concern and sources of uncertainty; (iii) a first stakeholder survey to identify perceived readiness, common heat strategies and their evaluation criteria; and (iv) a second stakeholder survey that revisits these criteria in the context of salient scenarios identified from public responses. This framework would reveal where convergence and divergence emerge amongst public concerns, scientific thresholds, and institutional priorities.

Preliminary results from the ongoing public survey, deployed across cities in different Köppen-Geiger climates, reveal that scenario magnitude (e.g., maximum air temperature) drives concern more strongly than duration (e.g., how long the event lasts) or time or planning horizon (e.g., when the event happens). This finding suggests that public risk perception is shaped more by the intensity of the extreme than by its persistence or proximity, with implications for how heat risk is communicated and prioritised in resilience planning. The survey also captures sources of uncertainty, with early indications that unfamiliarity with heat impacts and insufficient information about protective actions are key drivers of perceived unpreparedness.

By explicitly capturing uncertainty as a resilience construct and embedding iterative stakeholder engagement, the framework translates perceived concerns into decision-relevant insights. It offers a practical, transferable template for participatory resilience assessment that aligns risk perceptions with planning priorities, ultimately supporting legitimate and actionable climate adaptation strategies for extreme heat.