Socio-economic Impacts-Urban Complexes

This chapter examines observed and potential future climate change impacts on socio-economic fields concerning urban complexes in the Baltic Sea basin. This is based on the literature review that focused mainly on English publications on climate change impacts, but included some publications in other languages on adaptation. In the Baltic Sea basin, there appears to be an imbalance between cities and towns that have been well studied with reference to climate change impacts, and cities or even regions for which there is hardly any published literature. For those publications that do exist, most concern the impact of a specific climate change effect (temperature rise, extreme events, sea-level rise) on a particular socio-economic field of an urban complex. The results of the literature review indicate that urban complexes in the Baltic Sea catchment are likely to experience climate change impacts within wide-ranging contexts: from urban services and technical infrastructure, to buildings and settlement structures and to the urban economy or population. Impacts will differ depending on the location of the urban complex: northern versus southern and coastal versus inland.