Climate adaptation indicators
Measures that describe how exposed a place is to heat, heavy rain or drought, and how well it can cope, at a scale planning can act on.
Climate adaptation indicators describe how exposed a place is to climate risk and how well it can absorb it. The common ones cover heat, heavy rain and drought: surface and air temperature, night-time cooling, shade, tree canopy, soil sealing, green space within reach.
They exist because adaptation is local in a way mitigation is not. Emissions can be counted nationally, but heat and flooding happen on particular streets, so an indicator is only useful if it resolves to a scale a planning decision works at: a district, a block, sometimes a parcel. That is also what makes them demanding, because the data has to be fine enough to see the difference between one side of a street and the other.
The harder question is what happens to them afterwards. Many cities now publish indicators as maps, dashboards and sensor feeds, and only some of those end up as the basis for a decision. The ones that do tend to share two properties: a threshold that identifies places rather than describing conditions, which is what a deficit area does, and a named authority whose process the indicator feeds.