Urban Climate Adaptation Metrics: Development of District-Scale Assessment Indicators

Climate change and growing urban population require city administration to accelerate climate adaptation measures on all spatial scales. This includes both, implementation of strategies to promote impactful measures and objective methods to assess the degree of adaptation. To ensure a high quality of life, city administrations must prioritize these issues. However, evaluating climate adaptation on a district scale without substantial numerical modeling efforts remains problematic due to the lack of objective indicators. The research project “indiKWAtor” funded by the Austrian Climate Research Programme Implementation aims to develop a comprehensive set of indicators to address this gap and facilitate the assessment of the status of urban districts and potential development scenarios at an early planning stage. 

The methodology involves a thorough analysis of existing assessment tools and indicators, complemented by workshops with representatives from administrations of Austrian cities together with experts from the fields of urban climatology, landscape and traffic planning. This interdisciplinary approach supports the integration of various perspectives in the collaborative planning and conduction of the workshops.  

The key result of this project is a set of easily calculable and understandable indicators to measure climate adaptation of urban districts. Depending on the evaluation results, local weaknesses can be identified and recommendations to enhance different aspects of climate adaptation (e.g. urban heat, water retention) or conduct in-depth investigations are communicated. Consequently, decision-makers, city administration and urban planners shall be able to use the compiled indicators for a transparent, rapid and comparable assessment. The research serves as a bridge between theory and practice, leading to an easier identification and application of climate-proofing measures. Future efforts include the validation of developed indicators and their implementation in a comprehensive assessment tool for real-world applications in diverse urban settings.