Effects of extreme weather events and climate change on cities' livability.

The risks of climate change are increasing, and their impacts seem inevitable on the livability of climate-vulnerable urban areas. In this regard, the present study aims to investigate the effects of climate change on the level of livability in Sistan and Baluchistan province, located in the southeast of Iran, which is facing severe climatic tensions. In this paper, daily climate data of temperature, humidity, wind, frost, and precipitation from 2000 to 2020 were analyzed temporally and spatially. From 2010 to 2019, the livability of this province's cities was also evaluated using the multi-criteria decision-making method. Geostatistical analysis methods were also applied to understand the relationship between climate and livability. The results showed that climatic drivers strongly influence the provinces of Sistan and Baluchistan. The northern regions of the province had the highest number of drought, frost, and windy days compared to the southern ones. But, the average humidity and temperature of the central and southern regions were assessed higher than the northern ones. Therefore, the above climatic features exerted different effects on the livability process. The livability situation results indicated that the cities' livability level was different in the studied years. Many cities had a downward trend. Also, based on spatial statistics analysis, the distribution of livability at the province level was uneven and clustered. In addition, the evaluation of the effect of climatic drivers on the livability of cities illustrated that there is a strong correlation between the humidity driver and the trend of livability (with a correlation of 0.35). However, the drivers of temperature, wind, frost, and drought (with correlations of 0.06, 0.02, 0.01, and 0.02) individually did not have a significant relationship with the livability trend. However, a combination of temperature-humidity (with a correlation of 0.3) and drought-humidity (0.31) drives greatly impacted the livability of the province's cities. [Display omitted] [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]