In addition to direct climate impacts, interactions among changing urban form, exposure and vulnerability can create climate change-induced risks and losses for cities and settlements. Climate change already interacts with ongoing global trends in urbanisation to create regionally specific impacts and risk profiles. Through demographic change and encroachment into natural and agricultural lands and coastal zones, rapidly expanding urban settlements can place new physical assets and people in locations with high exposure . Increasing rates of global urbanisation will pose additional challenges to areas that have high levels of poverty, unemployment, informality, and housing and service backlogs . There is some evidence to suggest that climate change impacts themselves are increasing urbanisation rates, generating a challenging feedback loop. In sub-Saharan Africa, for example, manufacturing towns have experienced growth because of population movement following droughts in agricultural hinterlands . The rapid rate of urbanisation therefore presents a time-limited opportunity to work toward risk reduction and transformational adaptation in towns and cities. The following sections explore these dynamic interactions between urban systems and climate change, and how these shape risk for people and for key infrastructures.
IPCC
Climate Change 2022: Impacts, Adaptation and Vulnerability
IPCC Report