International Research Collaboration and Programmes for Urban Climate Science for Planning Healthy Cities

Abstract

Science has shown how climate change fundamentally influences cities—their infrastructure and inhabitants—and how cities may plan for the future. Effective and dedicated support should continue for the international scientific community to improve our knowledge through comprehensive measurements, transdisciplinary science, and quantified attribution, because these have enabled the society to link empirical verification of human health outcomes to corresponding actions and policies.

This chapter informs good practices of the present time for research partnerships, including the needs-driven research, collaborative networks, and effort for co-development of decision-supporting knowledge. Highlighting important findings in urban climate and health sciences, key research priorities, challenges and issues are discussed.

A holistic science-based service for urban health is essential to empower decision-making for sustainable urban life. To this end, there is a critical need for state-of-the-art climate information, tailored for urban areas and addressing their specific needs. It requires to deepen our understanding of, and to predict in all spatial and temporal scales and in resolutions fit to the purpose of decisions, complex climate processes and their impact to health. International effort should be extended for open-access and continuous observational framework for collecting key climate, health and other socio-economic metrics at the city scale.

A core challenge facing decision-makers is identifying and prioritizing climate change interventions in urban health under countervailing influences; therefore multi-disciplinary collaboration should extend the understanding and provide actionable knowledge on health co-benefits in the multi-dimensional and cross-sectoral ground. Efforts are to be furthered to improve integrating probabilistic information into operations. Improved interoperability between health and climate information systems will ensure a better understanding of the sensitivity of health to climate factors, as well as improved use of limited resources.