Assessing the impact of outreach strategies in cities coping with climate risks

Abstract. The resilience of our cities to weather extremes relies both on physical environmental factors and on socio-economic factors. The latter includes communication processes among the members of an urban community. This paper presents a study that aims at appraising how public outreach campaigns influence urban resilience. According to this research, seizing the added value of science outreach efforts calls for an assessment method that takes into consideration the interactions between communication processes and other urban resilience drivers. The paper begins by presenting examples of methods to assess urban resilience to weather extremes. We then propose an approach to comprehend the impact of communication activities on resilience in the context of urban flood resilience strategies. We use five guiding criteria to define “resilience communication indicators” and we present two communication assessment experiments based on these criteria. These experiments were undertaken to assess communication activities addressed to non-specialist audiences and tailored for a flood resilience project in the Paris region. Different research methods were tested through these experiments, with the goal of comprehending their strengths and weaknesses in the framework of urban resilience strategies.