The impacts of climate change on urban structures in Slovak cities: Identifying vulnerable urban structures

Abstract In the coming decades, our cities will face extreme weather caused by climate change, which they will have to adopt. Adaptation of the urban environment is attracting the growing attention of planners, researchers, and policy makers in Slovakia and around the world. As essential for urban environment, the National Adaptation Strategy identified the adaptation at local level, which represents the participation of municipalities, supports the development of local adaptation strategies and subsequent implementation of actions that provide the cities with stronger sustainability and resilience. Within the last 8 years since the adoption of the national strategy, only 8 out of 141 Slovak cities in total elaborated an adaptation strategy that could be considered for further investigation. Consequently, this paper aims to broaden our knowledge of the two most significant impacts of climate change–heatwaves and floods–on urban structures in Slovak cities and validate the importance of spatial vulnerability analyses as a considerable tool for the expected unified national methodology for developing local adaptation strategies. The study examines analyses of spatial vulnerability to heat-waves in Hlohovec, Košice – Západ, and Trnava, and analyses of spatial vulnerability to floods in Hlohovec and Kežmarok, developed as part of vulnerability assessment within the framework of adaptation strategies of these cities. The analyses selected for comparison allow us to identify vulnerable urban structures and provide a deeper understanding of the causes of vulnerability in Slovakia, which is crucial for the development of adaptation strategies in the future and the building of resilience in Slovak cities. The article provides an exploratory spatial analysis of vulnerability hotspots. Based on the findings, it outlines the principles of spatial planning and urban structures that are resilient to the impacts of heatwaves and floods.