New book on climate's urban challenges: Adapting Cities to Climate Change

Africa Science News: Mombasa residents are among most vulnerable to climate change, …according to a new book [which address] in detail the ways in which cities can adapt to climate change. [The volume is] by a team from the International Institute for Environment and Development.

According to the book, case studies of the risks faced by among others Dhaka, Cotonou , Mumbai, Rio de Janeiro and Shanghai describes one of the world’s first city-based adaptation plans – from Durban in South Africa.

Adapting Cities to Climate Change contains contributions by 37 specialists from a variety of disciplines, several of whom served on the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. It has chapters on key climate-related health issues in Asian cities, the particular impacts for children, the increases in flooding in African cities and the links between urban poverty and vulnerability to climate change in Latin America.

“Climate change threatens the lives and homes of hundreds of millions of urban dwellers because of the heat waves, sea-level rise and water constraints it is bringing and from the floods and storms that it will exacerbate," says David Dodman, who co-edited the book with Jane Bicknell and David Satterthwaite .

"Most of the most vulnerable people live in Africa, Asia, Latin America and the Caribbean and have contributed very little to the greenhouse gas emissions that drive climate change. There is an urgent need to begin adapting urban centres now so these risks can be reduced."The book describes how the first priority for adapting cities to climate change is to remedy deficits in infrastructure and services….