Expected start date:

2016•09•01

Expected end date:

2019•12•31

Institute:

UNU-EHS

Project Status:

Closed

Project Type:

Research

Project Manager :

Simone Sandholz

ZURES aims at developing new methods and instruments for a future-oriented urban vulnerability and risk assessment regarding heat stress. Besides concentrating on future shifts in natural hazard patterns around heat stress, the project especially focuses on shifts in socio-economic vulnerability, resulting from societal transformation processes.

Existing planning and assessment mechanisms will be advanced to inform the adaptation of urban planning and governance procedures. The ZURES project will work on the two German case study cities of Bonn and Ludwigsburg, where transformation processes will be assessed on urban and selected neighbourhood levels. Subsequently urban climate changes and scenarios will be identified and linked to spatially explicity socio-economic scenarios. By linking such methodological innovation to formal and informal instruments of urban development the project will contribute to strengthening both, the institutional and planning tools for a forward-looking urban transformation management.

In collaboration with the partners from the University of Stuttgart, the Technical University of Dortmund, the cities of Bonn and Ludwigsburg as well as private sector partner scenarios will be developed in a participatory approach together with urban key actors to identify drivers of urban socio-economic change, as a base for developing vulnerability scenarios.

UNU-EHS leads the development of conceptual analysis and evaluation schemes for urban vulnerability scenarios as well as the participatory assessment of vulnerability scenarios in the cities of Bonn and Ludwigsburg.

One main expected outcome is mainstreaming the results into global discourses and thus contributing to current initiatives of risk prevention and sustainable urban development (e.g. UNISDR, Sendai, Habitat III or the SDGs).