Climate change impacts a city as a whole but some urban sectors are more vulnerable to certain climate hazards than others. For example, pluvial flooding might not directly affect public health, but can affect  the transport network, causing a spill-over effects for e.g. industry.  Heatwaves are probably the biggest climatic threat to health, but can also pose challenges to water and power supplies due to  increased water and energy consumption.

The list of potentially vulnerable urban sectors and fields of activity to be checked in the assessment should therefore at least cover:

• Health
• Buildings
• Water
• Disaster risk management
• Transport
• Energy
• Industry
• Service sector, including Tourism
• Urban planning, including green and blue infrastructure
• Public health
• Social well-being
• Financial sector and insurance
• Environmental protection/ biodiversity

In some of the sectors, the municipality might have direct competencies and involvement, in others less so. Therefore, it is advisable to engage a wider range of sectoral stakeholders (see Step 1.6)  in the assessments of sectoral vulnerabilities. It is also important to look at cross-sectoral impacts and spill-over effects among the sectors; tools such as IVAVIA may be useful to assess impact chains. 

 The Covenant of Mayors reporting template includes the following potentially vulnerable urban sectors that were identified based on the feedback of city practitioners: buildings, transport, energy, water, waste, land use planning, agriculture and forestry, environment and biodiversity, health, civil protection and emergency, tourism.

The impacts per sectors should be assessed along the criteria in the table below