Climate services to support disaster risk reduction and climate change adaptation in urban areas: The CLARITY Project and the Napoli case study
This study sheds light on the emergence of climate services as an essential tool to bridge the advancement in climate science and meteo/earth observations with a variety of operational fields in the domains of Disaster Risk Reduction (DRR) and Climate Change Adaptation (CCA). In particular, it presents the features of CLARITY CSIS, an innovative hazard/impact modeling tool that takes into account short- to long-term climate change scenarios and urban microclimate variability. To fully account for climate-related disaster risks, new datasets were extracted from Regional Climate Models to estimate the frequency of extreme temperatures and precipitation events until 2100. The City of Naples, which experiences increasing weather extremes, serves as the subject of the study.
The study finds that the application of CLARITY climate services by local authorities can be of strategic importance in implementing urban climate adaptation from a multiscale planning and design perspective. CLARITY's “Screening” and “Expert” tools addressed the need for hazard/impact assessments for extreme weather events. Such assessments must be backed by reliable probabilistic impact simulations and cost-benefit analyses adequate to urban planning and design needs. The “Expert” level application for the City of Naples represents a step forward in the definition of a standardized approach to address climate-resilient urban planning and design in a multiscale perspective. Its replicability in other regional and urban contexts in Italy is currently discussed at the national level. Further relevant research developments will make it possible to expand the methodology adopted to multihazard assessments.