Two ORNL institutes, the Climate Change Science Institute (CCSI) and the Urban Dynamics Institute (UDI), have joined forces to address one of the most pressing problems facing mid-size cities today: how best to allocate scarce resources to deal with climate change. The solution they have come up with is a web-based decision support tool, the Urban Climate Adaptation Tool, or Urban-CAT.
To ensure that Urban-CAT will be useful and accessible to urban decision-makers, the project team—including Olufemi Omitaomu, Esther Parish, and Phil Nugent—is collaborating with the City of Knoxville, a DOE Solar America Cities partner.
“Different cities will face different challenges,” Omitaomu said. “If we can develop a useful tool for the City of Knoxville, we can customize it for other cities.”
Nearly 50% of the world’s population lives in mid-size cities, like Knoxville, with populations around 250,000. And the World Health Organization projects more than 60% of the world’s population will live in mid-size cities by 2030. Big cities have resources to deal with climate change scenarios, Omitaomu said. Midsize cities need tools to develop adaptation strategies they can integrate into their policies gradually.
The challenge in helping cities plan for this type of change, according to Omitaomu, who works for both CCSI and UDI, is that most climate models don’t provide enough information at a usable scale. Local planners need to understand what adaptation measures they need to put in place to alleviate repercussions from impending climate changes.
The Urban-CAT platform addresses this need by coupling climate projections with socioeconomic and infrastructure data at scales useful for urban planning. The platform also provides connectivity to multiple data sources for comparison and assessment of local project scenarios under different climate conditions. Finally, the project team has developed a set of urban resilience indicators to be used in assessing resilience and monitoring and in evaluating the effectiveness of selected adaptation actions in reducing risk.
Funded through ORNL’s Laboratory Directed Research and Development program, the project is a direct response to the President’s Climate Data Initiative, a broad effort to leverage open government data resources with tools to help communities become more resilient to climate change.
At the end of FY 2016, the second year of the project, Omitaomu said they will have a tangible product for Knoxville to test and start using.
