World’s largest cities from most to least resilient to climate risk

A new report has revealed the most and least resilient large cities of the world to the risk of climate change.

When it comes to the effects of hostile climates what matters is not just inherent risk, but rather the ability of a place to withstand that risk.

AlphaGeo, a geospatial AI company that analyzes and predicts location risk, ranked the resilience of 72 of the world’s largest cities.

Some of those cities exhibit “a dangerous gap between their exposure and their capacity to cope,” the company stated in a report.

Parag Khanna, AlphaGeo’s founder and chief executive said, “Resilience equals risk minus adaptation. Everyone talks about resilience, but no one measures it.”

Chicago was ranked the most resilient city. It’s in a temperate latitude, with good freshwater access and low hurricane risk.

Many of the least resilient places were South Asian cities with extreme exposure to floods and monsoons to which they were poorly adapted. Ahmedabad in India, on a riverbank, faced the highest risk.

The least resilient cities included three major cities each from India and Pakistan, two from Bangladesh, and one from Taiwan.

Khanna noted, “Accelerating climate change inevitably means far more release of water upstream. In that region, towns are naturally built in the traversable valleys, but those are also the lowest point, and water naturally flows downward along the path of least resistance. We are literally an insignificant obstacle to nature.”