Urban resilience operationalization issues in climate risk management: A review

This paper presents a review of existing strategies and tools aiming at facilitating the operationalization of the concept of resilience into built environments. In a context of climate change, increased risks in urban areas and growing uncertainties, urban managers are forced to innovate in order to design appropriate new risk management strategies. Among these strategies, making cities resilient has become an imperative. However, resilience remains complex to integrate into the practices of urban planners and territorial actors. Its multitude of definitions and approaches has contributed to its abstraction and lack of operationalization. This review highlights the multitude of approaches and methodologies to address the bias of the lack of integration of the concept of resilience in climate risk management. The limit is the multiplication of these strategies which lead to conceptual vagueness and a lack of tangible application at the level of local actors. The challenge would then be to design a toolbox to concentrate the various existing tools, conceptual models and decision support systems in order to facilitate the autonomy and responsibility of local stakeholders in integrating the concept of resilience into risk management strategies.