Climate Change Vulnerability Assessment in Türkiye: An Integration of Two Different Multicriteria Decision Analysis Methods (BWM and TOPSIS)

Abstract

This study examines the exposure, susceptibilities, and adaptive capacity of Turkish cities in order to assess their susceptibility to climate change. With an aim of developing a composite Climate Change Vulnerability Index (CCVI), data from socio-economic and environmental sub-indicators were evaluated, and the most appropriate indicators were combined. Utilizing a stakeholder-driven structured methodology, the Best-Worst method (BWM) is used to identify and rank context-relevant indicators and establish weights for aggregating indicator scores. The indicators are aggregated through application of the BWM weights using a linear aggregation method. A number of user-defined zones were ranked according to their importance to vulnerability to climate change by the technique for order preference by similarity to ideal solution (TOPSIS) method. According to the findings, the cities in the southeast and those on the northern, western, and southern coasts are the most at risk from climate change. Among all cities, 12% was classified as very highly vulnerable; 21% was highly vulnerable; 21% and 20% were shown to be lowly vulnerable and very lowly vulnerable, respectively; and the rest were assigned to the medium vulnerability class. Zonguldak, Hatay and Istanbul are the top three cities that were ranked according to TOPSIS methodology and are highly prone to the effects of climate change. The development of CCVI can be incorporated into the decision-making process to reduce vulnerabilities and exposure to climate change risk for the Turkish cities.