*2.2. RAF—Resilience Assessment Framework Description*

RAF sought alignment with international frameworks for resilience assessment, particularly with UNDRR Disaster Resilience Scorecard, both preliminary and detailed levels [6,7], and UN-Habitat, and made significant developments with regard to its scope and focus on urban services. The RAF considers the UN-Habitat resilience dimensions [29]: organisational (integrates top-down governance relations and urban population involvement, at the city level), spatial (referring to urban space and environment), functional (resilience of strategic services) and physical (resilience of services infrastructure). Time dimension is implicitly integrated as part of the analysis. The RAF (Table 2) has a hierarchical tree structure (Figure 2) meaning that, for each dimension, resilience objectives are defined, representing the ambitions to be achieved in the medium–long term by the city and services. For those dimensions related to the urban services, they firstly unfold into sub-dimensions, where each sub-dimension represents one service to be assessed. Each objective is described by a set of criteria that translate the different points of view associated with it. Each criterion assembles the respective assessment metrics, through which it is possible to classify the resilience development level by comparison with reference values. Metrics are then defined consisting in questions, parameters or functions used to assess the criteria. Some of the RAF metrics correspond to or were adapted from existing frameworks, mainly from UNDRR framework (former UNISDR)—found to be highly relevant for the scope of the RAF, and others were newly developed. In Appendix A, the complete structure is presented. As an example, Table 3 illustrates the metrics definition to assess, within the spatial dimension, the objective of spatial risk management from the perspective given by the criterion impacts of climate-related events, showing the hierarchical tree structure mentioned above.


#### **Table 2.** Overview of the RAF dimensions.

**Figure 2.** RAF tree structure.

**Table 3.** Metrics definition—example for spatial dimension, objective spatial risk management, criterion impacts of climate-related event.


The framework considers past, existing and future conditions in the assessment. To incorporate the uncertainties associated to expected variations in climate-related variables, some metrics are specific to CC assessment scenarios, namely those that address preparedness for CC, and that anticipate the city and services' exposure or vulnerability to future scenarios. Besides, the consideration of reference values allows to generally address uncertainties in the assessment.

A relevance degree is assigned to each metric, namely: essential, corresponding to all metrics with higher relevance, required to integrate the resilience assessment of any city or service, complementary, additional metrics to be considered whenever integration of city or service specific aspects is sought, corresponding to a more detailed resilience assessment and comprehensive, additional metrics recommended whenever a more in-depth assessment is aimed, for a city or service with higher maturity in its resilience path. Accordingly, depending on the resilience maturity, the city or service aiming to apply the RAF may select a given set of metrics, according to their relevance.

Additionally, every city or urban service needs to operate in its own specific political, economic, geographical, climatic and cultural context. Considering the context information is fundamental in interpreting any assessment. Following this, city and services' characterisation profiles were developed to integrate the RAF framework, regarding its scope and focus. These profiles require information on geographical characteristics, climate, population, economy and governance, built environment and infrastructures, for the city. Regarding each service, it considers information on context characterisation, climate and infrastructure assets.

#### *2.3. Research Sites*

#### 2.3.1. General

In order to test and validate the RAF to assess the cities' resilience to climate change with a focus on the water cycle, it was applied to Bristol (UK), Barcelona (Spain) and Lisbon (Portugal) by the respective cities and strategic services managers. These three cities represent diverse context characteristics as well as different climate change-related concerns. The application was undertaken using the RAF App, a web-based application tool reproducing the RAF structure that allows selection of applicable dimensions and services to assess and allows private submission of answers to the metrics. The results may be visualised graphically (Figures 3–5) and reports are also provided [30].
