Climate Adaptation and Resilience Across Scale
From Buildings to Cities
Climate Adaptation and Resilience Across Scales, edited by Nicholas Rajkovich, UB associate professor of architecture and Seth Holmes, provides professionals with guidance on adapting the built environment to a changing climate.
This edited volume brings together practitioners and researchers to discuss climate-related resilience from the building to the city scale. This book highlights North American cases that deal with issues such as climate projections, public health, adaptive capacity of vulnerable populations, and design interventions for floodplains, making the content applicable to many locations around the world. The contributors in this book discuss topics ranging from how built environment professionals respond to a changing climate, to how the building stock may need to adapt to climate change, to how resilience is currently being addressed in the design, construction, and operations communities. The purpose of this book is to provide a better understanding of climate change impacts, vulnerability, and resilience across scales of the built environment. Architects, urban designers, planners, landscape architects, and engineers will find this a useful resource for adapting buildings and cities to a changing climate.
Chapter 8: Increasing Adaptive Capacity of Vulnerable Populations Through Inclusive Design
As the effects of climate change continue to worsen, vulnerable populations will encounter even greater challenges and hardships. Climate change disproportionately affects older adults and people with disabilities, making them among the most vulnerable, during both climate-related emergencies and slow-onset disasters. Their functional limitations and reduced mobility are often compounded by other characteristics such as lower incomes, race, and age. This is further complicated by their greater dependence on physical, social, and economic networks and support systems, which are often disrupted during weather-related events. Despite acknowledging this complex problem, limited climate change literature provides specific recommendations on adaptation and coping strategies that can mitigate and minimize the harmful effects of climate change for these populations. This suggests an urgency to identify, implement, and promote more inclusive built environment, communication and education, and policy strategies that enhance their climate change resiliency. This chapter outlines the factors that contribute to vulnerability and the specific needs of people with disabilities as they relate to climate change, and describes how inclusive design can help reduce risk factors and build their adaptive capacity.
Authors: Jordana L. Maisel, Brittany Perez, Krista Macy
Publisher: Routledge
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Authors
Nicholas B. Rajkovich, Associate Professor in the Department of Architecture
University at Buffalo
Seth H. Holmes, Associate Professor of Architecture
Rochester Institute of Technology
Publisher
Routledge
Date Published
November 2021