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Twin climate cities—an exploratory study of their potential use for awareness-raising and urban adaptation

  • Guillaume RohatEmail author
  • Stéphane Goyette
  • Johannes Flacke
Original Article
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Abstract

Twin climate cities are pairs of cities for which it is appropriate to assume that the future climate of a city “A” will be significantly similar to the current climate of another city “B”. In this paper, we explore the potential use of the climate twins approach for the development of adaptation strategies to climate change in urban areas. We propose an innovative and robust climate-matching method that is suitable to link cities’ current and future climates. Of the 100 cities investigated, 70 have at least one twin climate region, and 39 have a twin climate city. The case-study revealed a highly significant similarity for temperature variables and heat-related indices, but a less significant similarity for precipitation variables. The Climate Twins approach appears to be a potentially effective mechanism for raising awareness about the pace of climate change and for easily identifying (1) future impacts and vulnerabilities associated with climate change as well as (2) policies, infrastructure, and best practices that should be implemented in a city in order to cope efficiently with future extreme temperature events.

Keywords

Awareness-raising Climate Twins Climate analogs Knowledge sharing Urban adaptation 
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Notes

Acknowledgments

The authors wish to thank the anonymous reviewers for their comments that helped improving the quality of this paper and Martin Lacayo for valuable language editing and proofreading.

Supplementary material

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Supplementary material 1 (DOCX 11 kb)
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Supplementary material 2 (DOCX 18 kb)
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Supplementary material 3 (DOCX 10 kb)
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Supplementary material 4 (DOCX 1682 kb)

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Copyright information

© Springer Science+Business Media Dordrecht 2016

Authors and Affiliations

  • Guillaume Rohat
    • 1
    Email author
  • Stéphane Goyette
    • 1
  • Johannes Flacke
    • 2
  1. 1.Institute for Environmental SciencesUniversity of GenevaGenevaSwitzerland
  2. 2.Faculty of Geo-Information Science and Earth ObservationUniversity of TwenteEnschedeThe Netherlands

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