*2.1. RAF—Resilience Assessment Framework Aims, Assumptions and Development Approach*

Considering the challenges of urban areas related to the potential effects of climate dynamics, enhancing urban resilience requires: (i) identification of the real needs, (ii) sustainable action planning and (iii) assessing progress. In order to support the mentioned requirements, bridging the gaps and the abovementioned needs identified, a Resilience Assessment Framework (RAF) was developed with the main purpose of contributing to the referred requirements, namely:


The RAF described herein considers the following assumptions:


The development and implementation of the assessment process, in collaboration with different stakeholders, promotes their empowerment and enhance their role in the decision-making process [26], as well as in the implementation of improvement solutions. To consider this, the RAF development was carried out in a stepwise process (Figure 1), comprising the analysis of existing assessment frameworks and related recommendations, and the definition of a preliminary proposal, which was validated to produce the final version.

**Figure 1.** Resilience Assessment Framework (RAF) development process flow chart.

The validation process included an external and an internal validation [26]. The external validation involved different stakeholders, representatives of research organisations, city departments and urban service utilities, allowing for incorporating their concerns as well as their own context and reality through collaborative workshops. Three workshops were implemented in each city, Barcelona (Spain), Lisbon (Portugal) and Bristol (UK), to obtain the stakeholders' opinion on the RAF relevance, structure and applicability, as well as their concerns, own context and reality. Overall, 24 to 38 stakeholders attended each of the sessions, from 13 to 24 different organisations, answering individually and by sector to several surveys.

To ensure coherence, feasibility and effectiveness of the approach, the internal validation was carried out in the abovementioned cities, having different characteristics and contexts, which applied this framework involving the respective stakeholders. Each city and respective services provided their own data and answers to all applicable metrics. From the external and internal validation analysis, it was possible to identify the RAF components that benefited from additional improvements and those that less fitted the cities' available information, thus supporting the development of the final framework herein presented. It is important to take into account that cities are multi-dimension entities and, therefore, urban resilience needs to consider multidisciplinary insights. Additionally, resilience of a city is determined by diverse interacting systems and their relationships. For this reason, resilience also depends on the overall performance, interactions and capacity of its systems in their everyday operation, not solely on its ability to cope with specific natural hazards or to adapt targeted areas to the impacts of climate change [27]. Thus, it is essential to address interdependencies and cascading effects [28]. Another relevant aspect is that it needs to include both sudden crises as well as interacting long-term stressors, address multiple hazards, characterise the specific geographic extent, consider physical dimensions, involve community members and be adaptable and scalable to different communities and changing circumstances [24]. These requirements were considered in the RAF development.
