Around the globe, cities seek to improve their resilience to face the stresses and shocks that are expected from global climate change and other threats. In implementing urban resilience policies, they are guided by different urban resilience conceptualisations.

Cities currently host more than half of the world population, a number which is projected to continue to rise. Urban centres also create large percentages of national gross domestic product (GDP) and are important sources of employment but also generate large proportions of national greenhouse gas emissions.

Recent decades have seen urban resilience becoming a more popular term internationally both within academic and policy circles. However, relatively little attention has been paid by the literature to the policy implications of striving towards more resilient urban systems and the challenges introduced by the complex, multi-level and multi-actor policy network that forms their context.

Countries across the globe are likely to face significant challenges in coming years that will test the resilience of their cities. However, there is often a lack of proactive evidence-based analysis of available options and their outcomes as well as indicators of success or progress.

This document provides a standardised classification scheme (conventions and protocols) to estimate the vegetation cover of large areas with high resolution and accuracy, which has potential use to inform and propose climate change adaptation/mitigation strategies.

Despite the current evidence on the thermal benefits of vegetation and water bodies, further research is needed to investigate how cooling capacities are influenced by particular types, amounts, and spatial arrangements of green infrastructure (GI). However, there are no commonly agreed typologies that can be confidently used to compare and report the existing climatological effects of GI.

There is ample evidence of the cooling effects of green infrastructure (GI) that has been extensively documented in the literature. However, the study of the thermal profiles of different GI typologies requires the classification of urban sites for a meaningful comparison of results, since specific spatial and physical characteristics produce distinct microclimates.

Evaporative Cooling (EC) is increasingly regarded as a powerful and effective method for building cooling, mitigation of Urban Heat Islands (UHI) and for urban adaptation to climate change (Kitano et al., 2011; Saneinejad et al., 2014).

Precipitation is a relevant climatic variable for building and urban design in hot climates, because of its potential to naturally mitigate heat excess in buildings and cities by evaporative cooling; and as a primary source of water to artificially reproduce this cooling mechanism, particularly in the humid tropics and subtropics.

Rainfall is seldom addressed in the analysis of climates for building design, usually neglected for building thermal performance calculations, and there is very little research about its potential cooling effect.