Monitoring Near-Time Changes in Urban Space Usage after Climate Shocks

Understanding how populations use urban space is crucial for assessing economic activity, societal resilience, and infrastructure accessibility. However, measuring urban space usage with the frequency and detail needed for these assessments can be difficult when relying solely on traditional survey methods. To address this challenge, the team proposes using mobility data—telemetry data from mobile devices—to create high-frequency indices of urban space usage. This includes areas like retail centers, construction sites, manufacturing zones, financial centers, and residential areas.

Recent uses of mobility data, such as COVID-19 Community Mobility reports and projects within the Development Data Partnership, have shown its potential for informing pandemic responses, analyzing public transit trends, and identifying informal trade routes. These examples highlight the value of mobility data in generating timely and detailed statistics (e.g., {cite}Achyunda2020MeasuringTE {cite}Makris2022MechanicalAF {cite}Saha2020LockdownFC).

This project aims to explore how human mobility and urban space usage change in response to climate shocks. The methodology and findings will enhance our understanding of urban space utilization during extreme climate events, enable regional comparisons, identify correlations between urban space usage and climate shocks, and support predictive analyses. Ultimately, this research will aid in making evidence-based policy and planning decisions to improve urban climate resilience.

To ensure that the research informs World Bank operations, the DECSC team is collaborating with the European and Central Asia Sustainable Development (SCADR) team. The ECA region is increasingly vulnerable to climate change, with rising temperatures and more erratic weather patterns leading to more frequent extreme events such as droughts, floods, heat waves, and forest fires. The poorest countries and most vulnerable households are expected to suffer the most from these impacts, through lost livelihoods and environmental degradation (e.g., {cite}worldbankeca). In response, the ECA SD team is spearheading a series of ASA and lending activities aimed at enhancing the climate resilience of ECA countries, particularly in urban areas. The research conducted under this grant will directly support these efforts.

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