Free Tool: Your City's Climate in 2050

[00:00:02] Welcome to the Green Urbanist Podcast, where we explore sustainable placemaking, climate action in cities and urban rewilding. I'm your host Ross O'Cealli, an urban designer, educator and sustainable placemaking consultant. Hello, hello Ross here. Good to have you back for another podcast. Today I'm talking about something that I think would be very useful for you.

[00:00:28] I'm going to talk a bit about some interesting research and about a new tool that will help you understand and communicate climate adaptation within cities and how the climate of particular cities will be changing over the next 30 years because of climate change. So I talk a lot on this podcast about climate adaptation and you probably know for your local area generally what direction the climate change is going for you locally.

[00:00:55] You probably understand that there's more storms happening or that you're promised more heat waves in coming years or that drought might start to become an issue. And maybe you've looked at, you know, some of the data, some of the science and you've seen that, you know, X many millimetres of rain will be more or less happening in the future and you get into some quite technical stuff. All this science is really important, but often the issue with it is that it's not in terms that people really understand.

[00:01:25] It's not very tangible and it doesn't really translate in our minds into something that we really understand and we go, yes, I understand what that means. And the implications of that are X, Y and Z. This is a problem, of course, for professionals like us, but it's even more of a problem when communicating with members of the public or with clients, people who don't have a background in sustainability.

[00:01:51] And it can really be difficult for people to grasp, like, actually, how will things be different in the future? Except for worse. I think that's what we hear a lot is things will be worse. So because of this, a group of scientists came together in 2019 to do a really fantastic bit of research. The paper is by Bastin et al. 2019, link to the original paper, which is open access, is in the episode description. So you can go and check that out.

[00:02:21] But I'll tell you a bit about it and I'll tell you about what I've done with their data to actually create a useful tool for looking at climate adaptation. So I'll just read out a quote from the beginning of the paper so you can understand what it's about. So to quote the paper, they say,

[00:02:38] By analysing city pairs for 520 major cities of the world, we test if their climate in 2050 will resemble more closely to their own current climate conditions or to the current conditions of other cities in different bioclimatic regions.

[00:02:52] Even under an optimistic climate scenario, RCP 4.5, we found that 77% of future cities are very likely to experience a climate that is closer to that of another existing city than to its own current climate. In addition, 22% of cities will experience climate conditions that are not experienced by any existing major cities.

[00:03:16] We notably predict that Madrid's climate in 2050 will resemble Marrakesh's climate today. Stockholm will resemble Budapest. London to Barcelona. Moscow to Sofia. Seattle to San Francisco. Tokyo to Changsha. End of quotes. So just to reiterate, what this study looks at is 520 major cities around the world.

[00:03:44] And they have looked at future climate scenarios to 2050. In this case, it's a fairly optimistic scenario. It's not the worst, not the best, but kind of assumes there is some climate action over the next couple of decades. And it looks at how the effects of climate change, how those will be felt locally for these 520 major cities. And then it compares that to the existing climate of other cities around the world.

[00:04:14] So that you can say London, for instance, is becoming more like Barcelona. And that gives you a very tangible hook because even if you've never been to Barcelona, you kind of immediately understand it's a Mediterranean climate. It's very hot in the summer. They probably, you know, don't have abundant water at some times of the year. And so that gives you, if you live in London or you're doing projects in London, it means you can look to Barcelona and you can say, this is the climate we need to be ready for.

[00:04:41] And we need to be adapting to this and building in some climate resilience. And then you can start to think, what do the Catalonians do in terms of their architecture, their public space, their urban design that, you know, works with this climate? And can we start doing more of that in London? So it's extremely useful from that point of view, makes climate change and climate adaptation very tangible.

[00:05:04] Now, unless you're one of those five or six cities that I, you know, mentioned in the quote, it's quite hard actually to get the data. So for the 520 major cities, to get access to all of that data that's in the paper, you have to go into there, you know, dig into the supplementary information at the bottom of the webpage. You do get a spreadsheet, but it's very complicated. It's very difficult to interpret. I mean, it's for doing statistical analysis.

[00:05:31] It's not for, you know, me and you to go in and have as a quick reference. So what I've done is I've just taken that spreadsheet and I've just cleaned it up and I've colored it, color coded it, and I've made it searchable. And I've turned it into like a table that you can search. So it's a simple spreadsheet. It's relatively easy on the eyes. It's very easy to navigate. So what you can do is you can just go in there. You can search in the right column for the name of your city or the city you're interested in.

[00:06:00] And immediately it will give you three existing cities that that city will be becoming like in 2050. So it actually gives you three options, not just one. And then it gives you a bunch of other columns, which is the raw data around changes in temperature and precipitation. So extremely useful to have all of this in one place. That spreadsheet tool is totally free. It's on my website. The link to it is in the episode description. So you can go and grab that.

[00:06:30] And I really hope it will be useful for you. And I'd love to hear if you find it useful and you're using it in your work. Send me an email. Get in touch and tell me, you know, how you've been using it. And important thing to say if you're worried about copyright and me stealing these poor scientists work, the article, the paper, the study is under a Creative Commons license. So you can see on the web page, it's Creative Commons open license.

[00:07:00] Anyone is free to take the work and redistribute it, alter it for any reason. So I'm pretty sure I'm covered and I'm safe and I won't be sued. But equally, you do have to cite your source. So I've told you that it's Bastin et al. 2019. I've put a link in the episode description to the original work. And if you're using this in any way, please do also cite that original source. And I've put an extra tab in the spreadsheet so you have that source to hand.

[00:07:29] So just make sure you do that, which is quite, quite important. Now, just before wrapping up, just to give a bit more nuance on this, because it is a very useful tool. And I've had good success using this with clients to really help them to understand how their local climate is changing.

[00:07:49] However, it doesn't paint the whole picture, because if you go to Barcelona today or in 2019, let's say Barcelona's baseline climate, what you'll find is something relatively pleasant, quite easy to live in in many ways. Obviously, people have lived there for thousands of years. What that, you know, masks is the fact that with climate change, weather is also becoming more and more unpredictable.

[00:08:18] And so flash flooding will become more common than it is currently in Barcelona. The number of storms, you know, happening and high wind events are becoming more and more common, but also more difficult to predict. And so I think when you're using this tool, it is a great tool to use, but you should always add on that element as well and say,

[00:08:43] let's not feel too secure in the fact that there's another city that's currently experiencing our future climate, because actually it's not going to be exactly that climate. It's going to be that climate plus a lot of extra difficult weather, natural disasters, extreme weather events happening in quite an unpredictable way. So very, very important. And that's pretty much, I think that's pretty much true anywhere in the world.

[00:09:11] So just, you know, take that on board as well and bring that into your work and your communications. All right, I'll sign off for now. I hope this is useful. Looking forward to getting your feedback. Check out the episode description for a link to that tool and I'll see you soon.