**1. Introduction**

We live in a world of cities, and that trend will continue in the future. Today, 54% of the world's population lives in urban areas, a proportion that is expected to increase to 66% by 2050 [1]. In addition, climate change is adding pressures and uncertainties that pose challenges to society, economy, and environment. In this case, focusing on the impacts to urban areas [2], climate change can affect basic urban services, such as water or energy supply, making the continuously functioning city capacity crucial for most parts of the world population. As the United Nations have stated, managing urban areas has become one of the most important development challenges of the 21st century [1].

According to UN-Habitat [3], urban resilience refers to the ability of human settlements to withstand and to recover quickly from any plausible hazards. Resilience against shocks and stresses not only refers to reducing risks and damage from disasters (i.e., loss of lives and assets), but also the ability to quickly bounce back to a stable state; the ability to adapt and transform towards sustainability. While typical risk reduction measures tend to focus on a specific hazard, leaving out risks and vulnerabilities due to other types of perils, resilience adopts a multiple hazards approach, considering all types of plausible climate-related threats.

Cities face a growing range of adversities and challenges in the 21st century, and increasing urban resilience is the only way to survive and adapt to the coming shocks and stresses that may

occur [4]. Due to climate change, critical disruptions occur too often in cities around the world. On the other hand, urban areas are complex systems that cannot be understood by sectorial and disciplinary approaches alone [5]. In this context, the RESCCUE (RESilience to cope with Climate Change in Urban arEas—a multisectorial approach focusing on water) project aims to assess current and future resilience (related to future climate change scenarios) through a multisectorial approach, taking water sector as the focus. Climatic drivers and pressures affecting the urban water cycle, such as droughts or heavy rains, can produce critical direct impacts on strategic urban services (water supply, wastewater and stormwater drainage, wastewater treatment, solid waste, telecommunication, energy supply, transport, etc.), and cause cascading collateral impacts on other services. Given the interdependencies existent between the several city services, RESCCUE focuses on the cascading failures that involve several urban functions [6].
