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Technical summary Cities have an increasingly integral role in addressing climate change. To gain a common understanding of solutions, we require adequate and representative data of urban areas, including data on related greenhouse gas emissions, climate threats and of socio-economic contexts. Here, we review the current state of urban data science in the context of climate change, investigating the contribution of urban metabolism studies, remote sensing, big data approaches, urban economics, urban climate and weather studies. We outline three routes for upscaling urban data science for global climate solutions: 1) Mainstreaming and harmonizing data collection in cities worldwide; 2) Exploiting big data and machine learning to scale solutions while maintaining privacy; 3) Applying computational techniques and data science methods to analyse published qualitative information for the systematization and understanding of first-order climate effects and solutions. Collaborative efforts towards a joint data platform and integrated urban services would provide the quantitative foundations of the emerging global urban sustainability science. 

The unprecedented number of devastating disasters recently experienced in the United States is a clarion call to revisit how we understand our vulnerability in the face of global change, and what we are prepared to do about it. We focus on the case of Hurricane María’s impact in Puerto Rico to underscore five critical concerns in addressing vulnerability and adaptation planning: (i) vulnerability as a product of flows; (ii) how our beliefs about the capacities of ourselves and others affect local vulnerability; (iii) the role uncertainty, politics, and information access play in amplifying vulnerability and complicating adaptation; (iv) the need for a better distribution of risk and responsibility in adaptation; (v) and the challenge of seizing the opportunity of disasters for transformative change. These five issues of concern were particularly evident in the case of Puerto Rico where Hurricane María’s 155 mph winds exposed existing infrastructural vulnerabilities, institutional incapacities, and socio-economic disparities. We argue that addressing these issues requires fundamental shifts in how we prepare for environmental change and disasters in the 21st century. We discuss promising approaches that may assist researchers and practitioners in addressing some of the underlying drivers of vulnerability, stemming from cross-scalar dynamics, systemic interdependencies, and the politics and social relations associated with knowledge, decision-making and action. We argue that society needs to broach the difficult topic of the equity in the distribution of risk in society and the burden of adaptation. Addressing these challenges and response imperatives is a central task of this century; the time to act is now. 

Abstract. Megacities are predominantlyconcentrated along coastlines, making them exposed to a diverse mix ofnatural hazards. The assessment of climatic hazard risk to cities rarely hascaptured the multiple interactions that occur in complex urban systems. Wepresent an improved method for urban multi-hazard risk assessment. We thenanalyze the risk of New York City as a case study to apply enhanced methodsfor multi-hazard risk assessment given the history of exposure to multipletypes of natural hazards which overlap spatially and, in some cases,temporally in this coastal megacity. Our aim is to identify hotspots ofmulti-hazard risk to support the prioritization of adaptation strategies thatcan address multiple sources of risk to urban residents. We usedsocioeconomic indicators to assess vulnerabilities and risks to threeclimate-related hazards (i.e., heat waves, inland flooding and coastal flooding) at high spatial resolution.The analysis incorporates local experts' opinions to identify sources ofmulti-hazard risk and to weight indicators used in the multi-hazard riskassessment. Results demonstrate the application of multi-hazard riskassessment to a coastal megacity and show that spatial hotspots ofmulti-hazard risk affect similar local residential communities along thecoastlines. Analyses suggest that New York City should prioritize adaptationin coastal zones and consider possible synergies and/or trade-offs tomaximize impacts of adaptation and resilience interventions in the spatiallyoverlapping areas at risk of impacts from multiple hazards.