An Integrated Framework to Streamline Resilience in the Context of Urban Climate Risk Assessment

Cities are increasingly acknowledged as crucial when facing climate change—and the environmental crisis more in general—, offering challenges and opportunities in terms of both mitigation and adaptation. Climate change‐sensitive urban governance requires proactive, integrated, and contextualized approaches, making room for the complex, multilayered, multiscalar, and dynamic processes constituting a city. The notion of “resilience” has been acquiring growing recognition as a flexible and powerful concept to respond to these challenges. Resilience itself, however, is also a polysemic notion, often treated as little more than a catchword or a wishful aim or superimposed with other climate‐related terms, such as risk, vulnerability, or adaptation. To promote a stronger integration among different problem‐settings and epistemic communities, this paper advances six analytical distinctions aiming to provide structure and articulation to existing definitions of the concept of “resilience.” Likewise, it offers an integrated analytical framework and methodological pipeline to streamline resilience analysis in the context of urban climate risk assessment. The framework is specially defined to link up with the definition of climate risk provided by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) latest Assessment Reports and is illustrated through examples derived from the recent experience of the Chilean Climate Risk Atlas. Plain Language Summary This paper offers an integrated terminology, analytical framework, and procedure to measure and predict a city's resilience in the face of climate threats. Based on a thorough review and discussion of the literature on the topic, the proposal is designed to articulate existing approaches, usages, and interpretations of the concept. It aims to guide scholars, practitioners, and policymakers to employ resilience as a tool for urban planning and governance. Key Points We advance six analytical distinctions and a methodological pipeline to streamline resilience in urban climate risk assessment Our framework promotes integrated and interdisciplinary efforts toward climate‐sensitive urban risk assessment and planning Polycentric governance is required to balance autonomy and coherence across the systems constituting urban Systems‐of‐Systems