How Climate Resilient Are the Largest Cities?

There's a very cool project wrapping up here in Zurich where they built a relief tunnel from the sihl river underground downhill to lake Zurich to handle 500-years floods.

One weekend they let people walk the length of the tunnel from the river to the lake. It was a pretty steep slope and about 3/4 down the walls of the tunnel changed from smooth to rough. They had calculated how fast the water would be moving when it hits the rough part and then how much that would slow it down.

Then at the bottom instead of emptying directly into the lake it comes flying out of the tunnel and smashes into a giant cement wall then flows under a roadway into the lake.

Cost was $200 million. A 500-year flood would flood downtown Zurich.

https://www.zh.ch/de/planen-bauen/wasserbau/wasserbauprojekt...

São Paulo is in the "green" but they were supposedly around two weeks from running out of water for municipal distribution in 2014/2015. A city of that size without water would not do well.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2014%E2%80%932017_Brazilian_dr...

https://www.smartcitiesdive.com/ex/sustainablecitiescollecti...

EDIT: added timeframe

For a USA county level assesment of climate risk I reccomend this site https://map.climatevulnerabilityindex.org/map/cvi_overall/us...

How is Miami not near the bottom of the list? Every time there is a moderate rainfall, streets flood like crazy. Plus we are in hurricane alley, and some models project that most of the Florida peninsula will be under water in 50-100 years.

Chicago resident here.

Not disputing the methodology, but our state is the nation's leader in tornadoes (by more than a factor of 2) due to Niña/Niño this year, and Chicago spent a few days this summer with the world's worst air quality due to Canadian wildfire smoke.

Obviously, "resilient" ⍯ "unaffected".

Many cities are heat sinks and make the problem worse locally due to lack of tree cover and an overabundance of concreta and tar.

Cities being resilient is one thing. It won't contribute to make agriculture resilient.

My concern with this analysis is that the headline "conclusions" depend on a proprietary composite index and assumptions. Where are the underlying data and methodologies for independent evaluation?

I was also surprised by how little attention the analysis gives to China and India. It's like measuring the smoke from a candle while standing next to two forest fires. The real-world impact is to decimate the economies of Europe while industry moves to China and India, who have no meaningful guardrails at all, making the claimed problem worse.

Honestly this list sounds like total BS. Doesn’t Chicago have a bunch of people die every time there’s a heatwave because of lack of AC and such? How are they possibly the best prepared city on the planet for climate change? The whole methodology here seems suspect at best.

Friendly reminder that the NOAA's USHCN reference network of well sited thermometers with continuous temperature records and no urban heat island bias shows no warming trend over the past ~20 years.

https://www.ncei.noaa.gov/access/crn/

Pretty darn resilient considering we’ve predicted climate doom for the last 30 years and they’re still standing.