New Framework Designed to Embed Climate Resilience Into Urban Areas

Neighbourhood Futures sets out five complementary capacities to help generate tailored, scalable strategies for climate resilience and health equity in cities.

Published 1 week ago | About a 4 minute read

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Global architecture, engineering and sustainability consultancy Ramboll and UK nonprofit Impact on Urban Health have launched Neighbourhood Futures — a framework designed to embed climate resilience and health equity into urban areas.

August 2024 was the hottest month on record, capping Earth’s hottest summer since global records began in 1880 — according to scientists at NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies. Heat stress is now the leading cause of weather-related deaths around the world, according to the World Health Organization, and urban communities are disproportionately affected — as the typical “concrete jungle” is characterized by a lack of green space and a predominance of concrete structures and streets that absorb heat.

A growing number of organizations are working to address this by increasing urban tree cover, facilitating community access to green space, and adding solar-reflective coatings to buildings and paved areas to help mitigate the heat island effect — but these efforts remain piecemeal.

The new Neighbourhood Futures framework is designed to enable the development of more comprehensive, diverse and locally sensitive strategies — each focusing on differing vulnerabilities, timeframes, resources, needs and performance objectives to reflect the diverse and uneven experience of climate extremes across urban areas.

“The climate crisis is already turning into a health crisis, but as a society we remain under-prepared,” said Peter Babudu, Executive Director at Impact on Urban Health. “The need to develop new ways for neighborhoods to withstand temperature extremes is urgent — particularly, because we already know that the health effects of climate change will follow existing patterns of inequality. If we are serious about mitigating the effects of climate change, collaboration across sectors will be crucial; the decisions we make now will continue to impact health outcomes far into the future.”

Adopting and adapting an existing framework for climate resilience developed by Dr Rutger de Graaf-van Dinther and Henk Ovink in 2021, Neighbourhood Futures sets out five capacities that can be used collectively to examine local conditions, evaluate plans and strategies, and shape new projects. The framework is intended to support practitioners — including housing providers, local authorities, the health system, construction companies, community organizations or urban planners — who are working on climate action and resilience plans and has been conceived as a cross-disciplinary tool for collaborative use by different departments and sectors.

“Now is the time to ensure that neighborhoods are prepared for climate change,” said Philippa Spence, Global Managing Director Environment & Health at Ramboll. “Practitioners will need to think about their work in a new way, whilst structural changes to neighborhoods and new interventions will be needed. The Neighbourhood Futures framework provides practitioners with a means of knowing what is needed to absorb the shock of climate change and ensure communities are resilient enough to respond to these pressures.”

Working at the neighborhood scale provided an effective entry point where local authorities, planners and others can reconcile large-scale, strategic objectives with local vulnerabilities, risks, needs, networks and community experiences. To develop strategic local climate resilience, Neighbourhood Futures adapted de Graaf-van Dinther and Ovink's framework and outlines five complementary capacities:

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 threshold levels.
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.
Transformative capacity – reimagining systems to make neighborhoods more resilient and equitable.

The framework provides users with a heuristic device or map to resilience, which can prompt collaborative and integrated approaches to climate resilience and health equity. When applied together, the capacities generate a comprehensive set of responses to local vulnerabilities. Applying the framework on a local scale supports equitable spatial, social and governance change.

“Neighbourhood Futures allows us to take multiple perspectives towards growing resilience in urban places by focusing on the different ways communities can be vulnerable,” said Shira de Bourbon Parme, Urban Wellbeing and Innovation Lead at Ramboll. “By supporting organizations to develop strategies to look at a range of vulnerabilities, plans can be made to help neighborhoods thrive – and not just adapt to our changing climate.

“We encourage organizations to develop this framework through applying it to their circumstances, sharing findings and recommendations of how it can grow.”