Wind disasters adaptation in cities in a changing climate: A systematic review

have reported their concerns about increased wind risks due to climate change between 2012 and 2017. 109 reports out of 263 (41% of total) labeled serious or extremely serious risks. In 2019, 87% of wind risks had corresponding adaptation measures but they were yet to be fully completed [26]. Concerns about increasing wind speeds were also included. Contrary to popu- lar belief, wind speed in a city can be faster than in rural areas despite the rough landscape of urban areas [27]. Ground-level wind speed increases significantly in streets between buildings [28]. These winds are harmful to pedestrians in terms of re-suspended particulates and flying debris [29]. Therefore, raised concerns as well as inadequate adaptation drive the academia to propose more effective suggestions and address the problems. Although case studies that discuss urban adaptation to specific wind-related storms are available [30], a systematic description of adaptation to wind-related disasters at the city level remains absent. Early studies that reviewed mitigation to natural hazards have failed to embrace the concept of “adaptation” [31], at the same time, existing literature reviews put more emphasis on general adaptation to climate change (including climatic hazards) instead of focusing on specific ones regarding wind disasters [32–34]. Compared with responding to long-term climate change, responding to extreme events is even more important since those events are more salient and intense [35]. Our comprehensive description of adaptation to

wind-related disasters will be useful in terms of systematically gathering pieces of knowledge and exploring innovative solutions for cities faced with severe wind disasters in the case of finite adaptive capacity. In this paper, we explore detailed contents in open-access literature that discusses adapta- tion to wind-related disasters in cities. Open access articles and journals are developing more rapidly than the average development speed of all types of articles and journals. It is becoming a popular platform for emerging subjects and distributing literature [36, 37]. More impor- tantly, open access articles are more advantageous in attracting stable social attention over time than non-open-access articles [38]. Since adaptation calls for public participation [39] and attention to the most disadvantaged population [40], open access articles are expected to provide these people with desirable and useful knowledge in a low-cost and equal way. Thus, we separated open access articles to see if they have formed a systematic knowledge system. This paper reviews the adaptation of cities to wind-related disasters in a structured way, with a special focus in the context of climate change. First, we developed a structured research query for systematic review. Then we extracted, categorized, and analyzed the embedded top- ics based on topic modeling. Next, experts read through the final literature database and fil- tered out cities and adaptation measures. Then we summarized the frequency of cities and

adaptation measures. We presented links between cities and topics, as well as between cities and adaptation measures. Finally, we concluded the important discoveries, limitations, and future directions. Methods A structured search query for web of science and scopus To answer the question of “what is studied” in a broad scientific field, we designed advanced search queries for Web of Science (WoS) and Scopus to establish a literature database. Biblio- metric analyses use these two search engines frequently. WoS and Scopus have a strong bias towards Natural Sciences and Engineering in their contents [41]. They share some identical journals while at the same time, each also has unique ones [42]. On one hand, WoS contains more subject areas [43] and has the oldest literature that can be traced back to 1900 [44]. On the other hand, Scopus covers many more unique journals [42] and non-English publications [43]. We combined these two search engines to make up for each other’s deficiencies. PLOS ONE Review on wind adaptation in cities PLOS ONE | https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0248503 March 17, 2021 3 / 26