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Notes & R eferences
increases in all regions and seasons in temperatures, models indicated
both positive and negative changes in precipitation. And second,
that ‘almost all model-simulated temperature changes, but fewer
precipitation changes, were statistically significant….’
13. A team of consultants upon which the author served experienced
this difficulty recently in Sana’a, Yemen, while trying to carry out a
probabilistic hazard analysis with flood modelling. This capital city
suffers from flash floods and landslides. Obviously it is challenging to
model flash floods that result from short cloudbursts, with daily but
not hourly rainfall data.
14. See H. Cleugh et al,. ‘Climate Information for Improved Planning and
Management of Mega Cities’. Unpublished draft.
15. See Raymond Burby, ed., Cooperating with Nature: Confronting
Natural Hazards with Land-Use Planning for Sustainable
Communities, p123.
16. UN-Habitat’s conclusions echo two of the calls for action that
appear in the Contribution of Working Group II to the Fourth
Assessment Report of the IPCC (p162): ‘new methods and tools
appropriate for regional and local application’, and ‘provision of
improved climate predictions for near-term planning horizons… at
the scales of river catchments and communities’.
Further references
- The Cities in Climate Change Initiative is funded by the Government
of Norway; UN-Habitat is the executing agency. The Urban
Environmental Planning Branch of UN-Habitat thanks Rodrigo
Sierra, Silva Magaia, Paulo Junior, and Shuaib Lwasa for comments
that improved the manuscript.
- In addition to draft assessments of cities and climate change, prepared
by the CCCI team for Kampala (Uganda), Maputo (Mozambique),
Sorsogon City (the Philippines) and Esmeraldas (Ecuador; publication
forthcoming), the present paper references the following documents:
Barrand, Nicholas, Tavi Murray, Timothy James, Stuart Barr,
and Jon Mills, (2009), ‘Instruments and Methods: Optimizing
photogrammetric DEMs for glacier volume change assessment using
laser-screening derived ground-control points’, Journal of Glaciology
55 (2009), 106-16.
Burby, Raymond J. (ed.), (1998), Cooperating with Nature:
Confronting Natural Hazards with Land-Use Planning for Sustainable
Communities. Washington, D.C.: Joseph Henry Press.
Cleugh, H., R. Emmanuel, W. Endlicher, E. Erell, G. McGranahan,
G. Mills, E. Ng, A. Nickson, J. Rosenthal, and K. Steemer. ‘Climate
Information for Improved Planning and Management of Mega Cities’.
Unpublished draft.
Parry, M.L., et al (eds.), (2007), Climate Change 2007: Impacts,
Adaptation and Vulnerability. Contribution of Working Group II to
the Fourth Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on
Climate Change. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Roberts, Debra. (2008), ‘Thinking Globally, Acting Locally:
Institutionalizing Climate Change at the Local Government Level in
Durban, South Africa’. Environment and Urbanization 20 (2008),
521-37.
UN-Habitat, (2006), State of the World’s Cities 2006/7. London:
Earthscan.
- For more information contact , Human
Settlements Advisor, UN-Habitat, Nairobi, Kenya.
first time the world’s urban population surpassed the rural. More
than 53 per cent of the world’s urban population now lives in small
cities, while another 22 per cent live in intermediate-sized cities.
Between 2000-2015, intermediate cities are projected to grow at a
faster rate than other sizes. See UN-Habitat, State of the World’s
Cities 2006/7, p4-6.
5. Additional classes of urban management tools include market-
based instruments such as tax and insurance-based incentives,
and information dissemination. In addition to urban management
tools per se, officials also use climate projections for disaster risk
management purposes (to develop a hurricane early warning system);
such applications lie outside the scope of the present paper.
6. Depending on the country, planners enjoy access to only a portion
of the full range of urban management tools that are theoretically
possible. In many countries such responsibilities are divided up
between different levels of government; the resulting need to
coordinate efforts complicates the urban management challenge.
7. In defence of this position, representatives of those cities can rightly
point out that it is the developed and not the developing world that
accounts for the great majority of GHG emissions.
8. For more on city-level baseline studies and commitments, see
Catalogue of City Commitments to Combat Climate Change at www.
. For an example of project and building-level emissions
analyses, see Debra Roberts, ‘Thinking Globally, Acting Locally:
Institutionalizing Climate Change at the Local Government Level in
Durban, South Africa’, Environment and Urbanization, (2008), 20:
521-37.
9. Some current research implies ongoing uncertainty as to the extent
of SLR that is likely to occur in the 21st century. For the ‘large
uncertainty’ in estimates of the contribution of melting glaciers and
ice caps to SLR 1993-2003, see Nicholas Barrand et al,. ‘Instruments
and Methods: Optimizing photogrammetric DEMs for glacier volume
change assessment using laser-scanning derived ground-control
points’, Journal of Glaciology, (2009), 55: 106-16.
10. In the Philippines the Department of Environment and Natural
Resources, along with the university-based Manila Observatory, has
already published a country-level map of ‘Combined Risk to Climate
Disasters’. Updated climate change projections are expected. Such
national level modelling may be particularly important in a country
like the Philippines, where projected SLR may vary considerably in
different parts of the archipelago, than in countries with less extensive
coastlines. See Parry et al (eds.), Contribution of Working Group II to
the Fourth Assessment Report of the IPCC, p484.
11. The two models that projected drier conditions in Ecuador were a
model developed by the Canadian Centre for Climate Modelling
and Analysis (CCCMA), and U.S. National Oceanic Atmospheric
Administration’s TL959 model. The three models projecting wetter
conditions were from Australia’s Commonwealth Scientific and
Industrial Research Organisation (CSIRO), the Hadley Centre
Coupled Model, Version 3 (HADCM3), and the ECHAM model from
the Max Planck Institute for Meteorology. Note that HADCM3 and
ECHAM were based on regional platforms – the PRECIS regional
climate modelling system from the Hadley Centre, and the Eta
atmospheric model as used by the Brazilian Center for Weather
Forecast and Climate Studies (CPTEC).
12. This Ecuador-level circumstance of disagreement between localized
precipitation projections generally mirrors two findings in the
Contribution of Working Group II to the Fourth Assessment Report
of the IPCC (p. 149). First, that, whereas model simulations showed