Increasing the resilience of Spanish cities through knowledge of the climate risk that affects them has been the objective of the project ‘Urban Risk: definition and calculation of climate risk in the urban environment’.

Increasing the resilience of Spanish cities through knowledge of the climate risk that affects them has been the objective of the project ‘Urban Risk: definition and calculation of climate risk in the urban environment’. An initiative of Factor Integral Services that has had the support of the Biodiversity Foundation of the Ministry for Ecological Transition, within the framework of its 2017 call for grants.

Both the scientific community and the population generally accept the evidence of the phenomenon of climate change. For years, work has been done on the calculation of emissions and the implementation of actions to reduce them, but the field of adaptation to climate change and the methodologies to be applied in this area is more innovative. For this reason, it has been important to establish methodologies that bring adaptation to climate change closer to actors who can implement measures to increase the resilience of populations, specifically urban populations.

Through the Urban Risk project, a tool has been developed that allows obtaining values on general climate risk at the municipal level for the present and for the end of the century.

The level of risk for different climate threats in Spain has also been measured, where the results have shown that currently the average national risk to climate change is at intermediate values, while in the future, in 2100, they will be high values. The specific impact that currently presents the most danger is droughts, although sea level rise and heat waves are expected to be greater. In general terms, a trend has been observed in the cities of the south of the peninsula towards a greater effect of the consequences of climate change, above the cities of the north of the peninsula.