Abstract
Sustainable development within the broader context of climate change is a fairly recent research topic that underpins positive trade-offs between mitigation, adaptation and societal objectives. Many decisions regarding energy and transportation infrastructures, buildings, sanitary and storm-water management, flood risk assessment and also biodiversity protection take place at the city level. In this context, climate change issues have been recognized as fundamental for urban planning, requiring an integrated response with combined mitigation and adaptation strategies.
This paper develops an approach to assess some of the trade-offs between climate change vulnerability and mitigation options for the residential building stock of 29 Portuguese Municipalities, within the context of a comprehensive Municipal Adaptation Strategies Project, ClimAdaPT.Local. The paper presents a methodology to evaluate climate change vulnerability of the residential building stock regarding thermal comfort of the occupants, based on expected impacts from climate change measures and adaptive capacity. Moreover, the impact on climate change vulnerability is assessed as a function of a set of mitigation options taken at the building level aiming to explore whether it would be cost-effective to invest on mitigation or adaptation measures or both.
Results are presented for the municipality of Cascais and major findings show the interplay between mitigation and adaptation measures which can be synergetic or antagonistic. The approach and methodology are being validated with the 29 municipalities covering varied climatic zones, construction materials and socio-economic contexts, which will result in a comprehensive range of trade-offs between mitigation options and adaptation needs at the city level.
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Acknowledgements
The work supporting this paper was funded by European Economic Area Financial Mechanism EEA – Grants through the project ClimAdaPT.Local, promoted by the Environment Portuguese Agency.
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Gregório, V., Simões, S., Seixas, J. (2016). Trade-Offs Between Climate Change Adaptation and Mitigation Options for Resilient Cities: Thermal Comfort in Households. In: Leal Filho, W. (eds) Innovation in Climate Change Adaptation. Climate Change Management. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-25814-0_9
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-25814-0_9
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