Assessing the Potential Impact of Heat Waves in Cities: Implications for Hazard Preparation and Planning

This paper summarizes the hazards of high temperature extremes in the built environment and considers the challenges of managing risk with uncertainty of prediction of the magnitude and frequency of events. The application of extreme value statistics on a typical time series of temperature data has provided some insight into the observed and predicted variability. Using a long temperature time series as an example it is shown that return periods and the increased risk associated with climate change can be interpolated from the analysis. Considering the chaotic nature of cities, their rapid growth and a warming climate, it is suggested that cities could be made more resilient to heat waves if governments were be better able to appropriately allocate resources to manage the hazard.