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.
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.
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.
("most of the Florida peninsula will be under water in 50-100 years" is certainly not true, however, Miami would be in a very difficult spot at 2m SLR)
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.
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.
This was the network that had heat island issues because it was volunteer stations highly biased towards urban areas.
It was superseded by USCRN in 2005, which is 114 stations intentionally situated away away from development. USCRN shows MORE warming than global networks, around .3* C per decade, and it recorded 2024 as the warmest year on record.
The problem is not that we couldn't improve cities to sustain -30 Celsius winters. This is doable. The problem is that places suitable for agriculture would vanish in the upper half of the continent. Canadians need to import many of their food and they are like 40 million people, Europe would need to find a way to feed 500 million people.
Cities resilience to war will be a concern much before climate resilience.
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.
Mmmm what to say.. I lived in Beijing, Shenzhen and Shanghai and I would say these cities are not really resilient. Yeah no major dams or glaciers that will trigger natural disasters but every typhoon season parts of these cities are flooded. Past three years I have been knee deep in water 3x a year in Shanghai, I have never seen anything like it (coming from Europe).
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.
> Doesn’t Chicago have a bunch of people die every time there’s a heatwave because of lack of AC and such?
There was a heatwave in the 1990s that killed thousands in Chicago. Since then, the city has done a lot to handle them. While people still die during heatwaves, not as many as would have prior to all of the planning and effort. I guess it depends on how you define “a bunch”.
The growing risk factor for Chicago is flooding and dangerous storms. So far this is causing economic damage but not really killing anyone. Who knows if that holds.
Chicago is lowest for adjusted risk because it just scores very low for physical risk on their scale. Compared to other cities the adjustment to its risk score for resilience is about typical - not great and not terrible - which suggests that yes, for what physical risks it does face (summer heat) it could probably do more to reduce those risks.
david pogue in "how to prepare for climate change" mentions chicago and the great lakes area in general as a "climate haven", so the idea is not complete bs.
If you predict an event that is 100 years away and 30 years pass, does the event that is still 70 years into the future vanish simply because the present arrived as predicted by the forecast?
Mind you, the forecast told us that we're still fine in 2026.
Places that used to be 32C in summer are consistently hitting 36C+. It absolutely sucks to be outside in those temps. You are running from aircon to aircon. Doom scenarios of unbearable heat is definitely true.
That doesn't relieve people of the responsibility of having enough scientific literacy to understand that 30 years is only an instant on geological time scales. And the fact that we see meaningful change at all on this time scale is very concerning.
Ah yes, I believe one of those models was called the Strawman Model, generated by Elliot F. Strawman during his tenure at MIT. He was forced into retirement due to his deep embarrassment over his model’s inaccuracies.
Anyway, Illinois is about to break the all time record for tornadoes by a single state, previously held by Texas, during the strongest El Niño ever measured. I’ll be proud tucking my kids in and telling them as long as they pray hard enough to the Gods of technological progress, we’ll be guaranteed to stumble upon a carbon sequestration technology akin to the Haber process and they won’t have to be forced into a Sophie’s choice when there’s only enough clean water for 2 of their 3 children.
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...
That IS very cool. I can’t help but appreciate the insight and forethought that goes into the decision to construct such massive waterworks projects.
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.
Most Americans are unaware of both how many people live outside of the United States and how bad things can get there.
This is not true.
Even in the most cataclysmic scenarios, scientists project Sea level to rise 2m by 2100, and most of Florida is above that level.
https://climate.mit.edu/ask-mit/what-are-best-and-worst-case...
As a researcher in this general area I would not say 2m by 2100 is a consensus view of the worst case scenario see [1].
Here is a useful scenario for understanding what different SLR scenarios mean for the states [2]
[1] https://www.ipcc.ch/srocc/chapter/chapter-4-sea-level-rise-a...
[2] https://coast.noaa.gov/slr/
("most of the Florida peninsula will be under water in 50-100 years" is certainly not true, however, Miami would be in a very difficult spot at 2m SLR)
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".
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/
> USHCN
This was the network that had heat island issues because it was volunteer stations highly biased towards urban areas.
It was superseded by USCRN in 2005, which is 114 stations intentionally situated away away from development. USCRN shows MORE warming than global networks, around .3* C per decade, and it recorded 2024 as the warmest year on record.
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.
Really smart point.
The problem is not that we couldn't improve cities to sustain -30 Celsius winters. This is doable. The problem is that places suitable for agriculture would vanish in the upper half of the continent. Canadians need to import many of their food and they are like 40 million people, Europe would need to find a way to feed 500 million people.
Cities resilience to war will be a concern much before climate resilience.
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.
Mmmm what to say.. I lived in Beijing, Shenzhen and Shanghai and I would say these cities are not really resilient. Yeah no major dams or glaciers that will trigger natural disasters but every typhoon season parts of these cities are flooded. Past three years I have been knee deep in water 3x a year in Shanghai, I have never seen anything like it (coming from Europe).
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.
> Doesn’t Chicago have a bunch of people die every time there’s a heatwave because of lack of AC and such?
There was a heatwave in the 1990s that killed thousands in Chicago. Since then, the city has done a lot to handle them. While people still die during heatwaves, not as many as would have prior to all of the planning and effort. I guess it depends on how you define “a bunch”.
The growing risk factor for Chicago is flooding and dangerous storms. So far this is causing economic damage but not really killing anyone. Who knows if that holds.
Chicago is lowest for adjusted risk because it just scores very low for physical risk on their scale. Compared to other cities the adjustment to its risk score for resilience is about typical - not great and not terrible - which suggests that yes, for what physical risks it does face (summer heat) it could probably do more to reduce those risks.
david pogue in "how to prepare for climate change" mentions chicago and the great lakes area in general as a "climate haven", so the idea is not complete bs.
This is America, not a Europoor country.
Pretty darn resilient considering we’ve predicted climate doom for the last 30 years and they’re still standing.
If you predict an event that is 100 years away and 30 years pass, does the event that is still 70 years into the future vanish simply because the present arrived as predicted by the forecast?
Mind you, the forecast told us that we're still fine in 2026.
I'm basically on your side here, but there were plenty of models predicting catastrophe by now.
Places that used to be 32C in summer are consistently hitting 36C+. It absolutely sucks to be outside in those temps. You are running from aircon to aircon. Doom scenarios of unbearable heat is definitely true.
That doesn't relieve people of the responsibility of having enough scientific literacy to understand that 30 years is only an instant on geological time scales. And the fact that we see meaningful change at all on this time scale is very concerning.
Ah yes, I believe one of those models was called the Strawman Model, generated by Elliot F. Strawman during his tenure at MIT. He was forced into retirement due to his deep embarrassment over his model’s inaccuracies.
Anyway, Illinois is about to break the all time record for tornadoes by a single state, previously held by Texas, during the strongest El Niño ever measured. I’ll be proud tucking my kids in and telling them as long as they pray hard enough to the Gods of technological progress, we’ll be guaranteed to stumble upon a carbon sequestration technology akin to the Haber process and they won’t have to be forced into a Sophie’s choice when there’s only enough clean water for 2 of their 3 children.
Mind sharing some? I often hear people believe climate scientists frequently overstate things, and I can’t recall seeing good examples of this.
Watch “an inconvenient truth”