Hrvatski
Vienna local government seeks to establish climate protection zones within which construction of new buildings would exclude the usage of oil or gas, while the supply of heating, cooling, and hot water would be based on district heating system or other environmentally friendly energy sources.
What to invest in?
Urban areas are home to more than half the global population and are centers of opportunity and innovation. Adaptation efforts, if designed well, can take advantage of this transformative energy and generate high economic returns. In coastal cities, for instance, the cost of good adaptation is one-tenth of the cost of no action. To plan and deliver more resilient urban services, cities everywhere need to invest in better climate risk information and technical capacity, drawing on credible topographic and community-level data. They should also invest in nature-based solutions to tackle water and heat risks, and in upgrading the living conditions of the 880 million people living in informal settlements that are highly vulnerable to climate change.
Ports, roads, power, sanitation, sewer, and communications systems are all examples of infrastructure assets at risk from climate change. Climate-proofing existing infrastructure and building new infrastructure that is more climate-resilient makes sound economic sense—on average, the benefits outweigh costs by 4:1.
Investments in infrastructure need to directly build resilience, whether
for storm-water drainage in cities or protecting coastal communities against sea-level rise. This will require developing blended public-private approaches that share the costs and benefits of investing in resilient infrastructure. Finally, we need to go beyond protecting individual assets to ensuring that the whole system is more resilient by making the right choices about where and what to build, which existing assets to upgrade, prioritizing green infrastructure wherever possible, and ensuring infrastructure continues to function even as damages occur.
In Vienna, as a result of these newly introduced climate protection zones, around 8000 apartments will be built each year in a more sustainable fashion.
