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GLOBAL ENVIRONMENT OUTLOOK FOR YOUTH IN ASIA AND THE PACIFIC Hand-in-hand for disaster risk reduction


Resilience to natural hazards can also be increased through the efforts of individual households and communities. Households, for example, can reduce their exposure to floods by raising the elevation of the land on their property before building, or by building their homes on stilts or piles. Communities can take collective action by advocating the conservation of local ecosystems/local urban green spaces, or by conducting such disaster preparedness training as flood evacuation drills. Through online communities and crowdsourcing, people from all over the world now have the power to participate in disaster risk reduction and recovery efforts. The Humanitarian OpenStreetMap Team (https://www.hotosm.org/), for example, regularly organizes mapathons in which volunteers work together online to map key infrastructure – buildings, roads, etc. – in areas heavily affected by climate-related disasters.


4.3 Heat waves and rising sea levels


In addition to disasters, other impacts of climate change on urban development can be seen in gradually rising urban temperatures and sea levels (Hunt and Watkiss 2011). While rising temperatures pose an issue for the region as a whole, it is particularly relevant to urban areas. This is because temperatures tend to be higher in cities due to increased human activity, such as heat generated by vehicle exhausts, low vegetation cover and the wide use of highly-absorbent construction materials such as black asphalt (McCarthy et al. 2010). This phenomenon is commonly referred to as the urban heat island. So, cities face increasing temperatures due to changes in both the global and local climate. Over time, heat islands can raise energy demand and costs,


increase air pollution, affect water availability and quality. and lead to heat-related illnesses (Box 20; Deilami et al. 2018). This has direct economic, social and health impacts on people living in cities. Rising urban temperatures are especially concerning for Asia and the Pacific given the prevalence of mega-cities in the region.


The coastal location of many cities in the Asia-Pacific region also increases their exposure to another impact of rising global temperatures, sea-level rise (Prasad et al. 2009). Sea-level rise can lead to increased flooding and damage to the built environment, and negatively affect the health and well-being of urban residents, particularly the most vulnerable people (Barbier 2014).


It is also important to consider the level of vulnerability of the people living in the areas affected by these problems. For example, as Figure 34 shows, areas with a high risk of sea-level rise and storm surges are often occupied by poorer, socially disadvantaged people. Pre-existing social structures and socio-economic gaps within a society can also hinder people’s ability to adopt mitigation and adaptation approaches to address the long-term effects of climate change. In this context, we need to enhance people’s capacities by improving social capital in local communities, municipalities, countries and regions (Sarzynski 2015). Social capital, the shared values the understanding within communities that allows them work together effectively, underpins effective collective activities for climate change adaptation – coping with these challenges. The following subsections provide some examples of approaches that tackling rising temperatures, including the heat-island effect and sea-level rise. They can be utilized at the local community level, municipality level, and international level, respectively.


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