The region of Southeast Asia is currently home to more than 600 million people. With rapid ongoing urbanisation, an increasing proportion of its people will be based in its capital cities. As with most other cities worldwide, urban residents in Southeast Asia will be vulnerable to extreme weather-related events due to a combination of several geographic factors.
These include:
(i.) the location of cities relative to coastal and low-elevation regions,
(ii.) high concentrations of people with differing income levels and access to resources, as well as
(iii.) inherent inter-dependencies in urban infrastructure, and increasing systemic complexities in policy implementation.
The urban response towards recent extreme weather events affecting the region – e.g. floods, droughts, tropical cyclones, and extreme thermal discomfort episodes – illustrate varying levels of municipal resilience towards these climate “shocks”. Documentation and analysis of this resilience is needed especially as global climate change appears likely to increase frequencies and/or intensities of extreme weather episodes. In this talk, Dr Chow examines and discusses the shifting trends in climate data in several major Southeast Asian cities with respect to extreme weather events, and illustrate these implications of extreme weather on current patterns of urban resilience from several recent case studies.