Community Resilience to Climate Change: Theory, Research and Practice

8 science in post-war years. The leading protagonist was the German-born Helmut Landsberg who moved to the US from Germany in 1934 to teach the first graduate course on bioclimatology. A major figure in American meteorology, he served as director of the US Weather Bureau office of climatology from 1954 to 1967 and was a key architect of the modern-day NOAA. As US representative, he became a leading light in the early decades of theWorldMeteorological Organisation, chairingWMO’s Committee for Special Applications of Meteorology and Climatology from 1971 to 1983. Landsberg had a particular interest in the science of urban climates, eventually authoring his own successor volume to Krazter’s Das Stadtklima, The Urban Climate (1981). One of his most distinctive contributions to the literature was a longitudinal study of the new town of Columbia, Maryland, monitoring for the first time the emergence of an urban heat island as a greenfield site with 200 residents in 1968 was developed into a town of 20,000 population by 1975 (Landsberg, 1979). Heat island studies at every scale continued to be a central object of research as the field of urban climatology developed in the second half of the 20th century. The geographer Tony Chandler analysed the entire metropolitan climate of Greater London, combining the German technique of automobile-mounted instrumental traverses with a British-style field survey involvement of schools, training colleges and volunteers (Chandler, 1965). The ambitious $10 million Metropolitan Meteorological Experiment METROMEX monitored an area of more than 4000 square kilometres around St Louis and controversially attributed anomalous patterns of thunderstorms, hailstorms and heavy rain to pollution drift east of the city (Changnon, 1979). Other researchers were tracking the Chicago dust plume 150 miles north-west to Madison Wisconsin (Bryson and Ross 1972, p. 64) and demonstrating the radical impacts of Houston’s post- war development boom upon its rainfall pattern (Ferrar, 1976, pp. 60–98). Belying Patrick Geddes’s expectation of the clean technologies of the 20th century, pollution concerns continued to dominate the post- war climate agenda thanks to rapidly rising traffic levels and complex new types of industrial emissions—including lead, asbestos, micro-organisms, NOx, SOx, hydrochloric acid, particulates, aerosols and radioactivity—which dispersed under free wind conditions but could be trapped and combined into chemical soups under conditions of thermal inversion. At the conclusion of the second edition of Das Stadtklima, Albert Kratzer defined air pollution as the outstanding issue of the urban environment: Enormous amounts of gases as well as liquid and solid matter are poured into the air every day by urban industry, household heating and traffic. It is not too far-fetched to compare the city to a volcano which continuously spews forth clouds of gas, dust and ashes (Kratzer, 1956, p. 166). London experienced deadly smogs in 1952 and 1955, and New York on Thanksgiving Day of 1966 and in July 1970 (Bach, 1972). The first international conference on air pollution took place in New York in 1955 and Helmut Landsberg convened a major scientific gathering in St Louis in 1961, under the title ‘Air over cities’ (Landsberg, 1961). In these Cold War years, urban climate research also had the stimulus of the Soviet Union’s known use of weather engineering technologies, and military concern for climatic dispersal of chemical and radioactive hazards (Derrick Sewell, 1968; Ferrar, 1976; Fleming, 2010). One effect was to bring more atmospheric chemistry and physics into the urban arena. Newmeasurement techniques such as constant- height balloons and remote sensing were added to the traditional repertoire of meteorological observation. The focus of analysis shifted towards measurement and modelling of energy fluxes on the meso-scale of the urban boundary layer and the micro-scale of the street canyon. Seminal contributions such as Ted Munn’s Descriptive Micrometeorology (1966), Werner Terjung’s The energy balance climatology of a city–man system (1970) and Tim Oke’s Boundary Layer Climates (1978) laid the basis for progressively more sophisticated numerical modelling of the urban climate as computing power increased (Arnfield, 2003). Urban climatology was enriched by cross-disciplinarity: fluid mechanics contributed the techniques of CFD (computational fluid dynamic) modelling to simulate air flow in the complex three-dimensional urban environment; geography contributed GIS (geographical information system) methodology, allowing datasets on urban land use to be combined with atmospheric variables at high levels of resolution; architecture contributed CAD (computer assisted design), providing the link between urban-scale climatology and the burgeoning fields of environmental engineering and passive and low-energy architecture (PLEA); environmental management contributed modelling software such as the ENVI-met freeware which allows three-dimensional surface–plant–air interactions to be simulated at high levels of resolution. Last but not least, increased computing power and speed within the parent discipline of meteorology brought greater spatial precision to weather modelling so that for the first time urban-scale climatology could begin to be integrated with the synoptic mainstream (Masson, 2000). The scientific consolidation of urban meteorology was matched at the institutional level. Helmut Landsberg played a key role in establishing urban climatology networks within the World Meteorological Organisation. A meeting on Urban Climates and Building Climatology jointly sponsored with the World Health Organisation in Brussels in 1968 was the first in a regular and continuing series of scientific conferences and state-of-the art reviews, led first by Tony Chandler and then by the Vancouver-based urbanmeteorologist Tim Oke. Significant features at the international level have been the continuing strength of the German research tradition, the emergence (with direct German links) of an equally vigorous scientific culture in Japan, the linkage to other UN-related agencies such as WHO, UNEP, UN-HABITAT, and the CIB, and the co-sponsorship of non-governmental bodies such as the International Federation for Housing and Planning (IFHP) and the International Society for Biometeorology (ISB). Conscious of the need to establish their group identity, urban climate scientists formed their own International Association for Urban Climatology (IAUC) in 2001 under the leadership of Tim Oke. IAUC’s website and three-yearly conferences are the principal focus for urban climatology today. So the organisation is relatively new, but the scientific community has a 200-year track record of work on anthropogenic climate change.