A s the need to understand urban climate vulnerabilities increases, the uptake of climate risk assessments among urban planners, city managers, and development professionals is growing and spreading across the world. Given the proliferation of different assessment approaches, there is ample opportunity to share best practices and advice on overcoming commonly encountered challenges among city leaders and practitioners to promote effectiveness, efficiencies, and applications of findings.

Understanding the current and future climate risk of a city through a Rapid Climate Risk Assessment (RCRA) can help identify, prioritize, and implement urban solutions and planning actions that prevent locking in errors made by other cities of the world. An RCRA gathers vital information on climate hazards and risks, infrastructure bottlenecks, past and current initiatives, and relevant policies and institutions. It identifies specific neighborhoods and districts that have recently experienced floods and other high-impact climate-related disasters.

This video shows highlights from a knowledge exchange on Urban Climate Risk Assessments conducted by the Global Center on Adaptation (GCA). The knowledge exchange brought together local implementers who have participated in the Rapid Climate Risk Assessment (RCRA) process, city officials interested in learning about the RCRA process, GCA colleagues and consultant firms that carried out the RCRAs (i.e. SWECO, Groupe Huit), Members of the Resilient Cities Network (RCN) and other risk assessment practitioners.