Support cities with practical climate parameters in everyday life

Photo: Daniel Kocherscheidt / pixelio.de

Cities should adapt to climate change. But how should that happen? To this day, small-scale forecasts are still difficult. The South German Climate Office at IMK-TRO has carried out a project in which exactly this dialogue was the focus. For this purpose, a city surveys was carried out with the support of the “Städtetag Baden-Württemberg”. Among other things, this survey asked about the status of climate change adaptation and about which climate parameters information are used or desired.

As a result of the survey, it has been shown that adaptation is seen as an important topic. However, it is still little implemented, because the topic is relatively new. From the results of the survey (23 cities) and additional interviews with about 20 experts from different fields, about 40 new climatic parameters were derived, whose future development could be calculated with regional climate simulations. All factors are based on the practical experience of decision makers. Examples range from the "amount of precipitation during planting" from forestry to "favorable weather conditions for ticks" in the health sector to "days of walking" for tourism. Another example is "weather conditions for the winter service". These are strongly linked to the winter services experiences, since a rarer occurrence of such weather conditions can affect the personnel planning and the purchase of litter material.

For more details, have a look at the ESKP-special topic “Metropolises under pressure (in german)”:
https://themenspezial.eskp.de/metropolen-unter-druck/staedte-erforschen/praxisnahe-klimakenngroessen/

[South-German Climate Office at the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology]