Following a Step by Step Development of a Resilience Action Plan

Assessing the Inclusion of Water Circularity Principles in Environment-Related City Concepts Using a Bibliometric Analysis

Cities face increasing water pressure and supply issues, jeopardizing the balance between growth and sustainable water resource use. Green, resilient, smart, circular, blue, water sensitive, or water-wise city concepts are increasingly part of the design of strategies to rethink cities. These concepts have motivated many studies, but little is known about their relative relevance among the scientific community and how they consider water circularity. The objective of this study is to assess how these city concepts incorporate water circularity principles. The assessment is based on a bibliometric analysis of scientific articles recently published. The findings show that despite the wide number of articles dedicated to the various city concepts, water circularity-related challenges are still a small niche of concern, strongly driven by European authors. Moreover, our study showed that water circularity principles are not equally considered among the different city concepts. This uneven assimilation of principles in influential city concepts unveiled gaps regarding water circularity. This brings a new perspective to the use of more integrated definitions, highlighting the importance of such principles in the future use of these concepts when envisioning roadmaps toward sustainable water use in cities.

Telluric and Climate-Related Risk Awareness, and Risk Mitigation Strategies in the Azores Archipelago: First Steps for Building Societal Resilience

Islands are often considered excellent socio-ecological laboratories for testing the rapidity of global change since they experience the climate effects of sea-level rise faster than other areas. The Azores are a Portuguese volcanic archipelago located on the junction of the three tectonic plates: the Eurasian, the African and the North American plates. São Miguel, the main island of the Azores archipelago, hosts three active volcanoes, but the last significant volcanic eruption was the Capelinhos volcano on the island of Faial in 1957. Hence, the Azores offers the opportunity to assess insular risk awareness, facing both telluric and climate-related hazards. The key research question emerges from their natural situation: how does the local population perceive the threat of the natural hazards that occur in Azores? Because risks are socially constructed and depend on the uniqueness of territories, risk mitigation strategies must focus on the individual experiences of local dwellers, as a relationship between risk awareness and such strategies may be expected. To analyze this relationship, a web-based survey with a questionnaire including these variables was administered to a sample of Azoreans. The study aimed to assess risk awareness of the Azorean population and find a relationship between this and reported mitigation strategies. The results gave a preliminary insight into Azorean risk awareness of natural hazards and showed a significant positive relationship between risk awareness-raising activities and reported mitigation strategies. This is relevant information for municipalities and regional governments of areas with similar risk exposures, showing that, although risk awareness alone is not enough for measures to be implemented, it may be an important motivational first step for this to occur.

Increased Urban Resilience to Climate Change—Key Outputs from the RESCCUE Project

RESCCUE is an H2020 research project that aims to help cities around the world to become more resilient to physical, social, and economic challenges, using the water sector as the central point of the approach. Since 2016, RESCCUE has been developing methodologies and tools to support cities increase their resilience. The three RESCCUE cities, Barcelona, Bristol, and Lisbon, have become a testing platform for the cutting-edge technologies developed in RESCCUE but these are also ready to be deployed to different types of cities, with different climate change pressures. This paper presents some of the main outputs generated by RESCCUE. From climate change scenarios to dissemination tools, and from sectorial models to Resilience Action Plans (RAPs), the outputs that have been produced are very diverse, but special focus is put on the urban water cycle and urban floods. All the project results have a common goal: to increase the resilience of cities from around the world, by offering the methodologies and tools so anyone can take advantage of using them and replicate the RESCCUE results.