Mobile Phone Data for Urban Climate Change Adaptation: Reviewing Applications, Opportunities and Key Challenges

Abstract

Climate change places cities at increasing risk and poses a serious challenge for adaptation. As a response, novel sources of data combined with data-driven logics and advanced spatial modelling techniques have the potential for transformative change in the role of information in urban planning. However, little practical guidance exists on the potential opportunities offered by mobile phone data for enhancing adaptive capacities in urban areas. Building upon a review of spatial studies mobilizing mobile phone data, this paper explores the opportunities offered by such digital information for providing spatially-explicit assessments of urban vulnerability, and shows the ways these can help developing more dynamic strategies and tools for urban planning and disaster risk management. Finally, building upon the limitations of mobile phone data analysis, it discusses the key urban governance challenges that need to be addressed for supporting the emergence of transformative change in current planning frameworks.

Development and usability testing of an educational mobile learning app for climate change and health impacts

“…Another interesting approach to Climate Change and adaptation was collecting and analyzing mobile phone data for the analysis of urban population activities and mobility patterns at high spatial and temporal resolutions. Technologies such as mobile phone data are a main asset for addressing climate-related risk within cities, better addressing the vulnerability of urban communities and managing climate risks in a continuous manner, thereby overcoming the limitations of static planning approaches based on population estimations from census data [55].…”

Longitudinal Collection and Analysis of Mobile Phone Data with Local Differential Privacy

“…Numerous previous [16,20,21,36] and current studies [10,[26][27][28][29] have shown the validity and benefits of mobility studies based on CDRs. Although event-based (i.e., data are only available when using the MNOs' services) and with coarse location (i.e., antennas that handled the service), CDRs are a real marker of human presence.…”

“…Indeed, multi-dimensional human mobility analyses would provide more insights into people's mobility behavior by attribute values (e.g., gender, origin, age-ranges). For instance, local authorities and/or organizations could take advantage of such knowledge to identify strategies to propose better decision-making solutions to society, e.g., the spread of diseases, urban planning, natural disasters, and so on [10,20,21,26,28,29,36].…”

“…Although event-based (i.e., data are only available when using the MNOs' services) and with coarse location (i.e., antennas that handled the service), CDRs are a real marker of human presence. Such a data source has been proven as a prominent way to analyze large-scale human mobility due to the high penetration rates of cell phones and low collection costs [6,10,17].…”

“…CDRs are stored by mobile network operators (MNOs) for billing and legal purposes, which implies an offline, archived, and constant update of the data without changing nor deleting old records. In other words, CDRs are of easy access and, therefore, have become one of the most used data for research [6,10,17], e.g., on human mobility.…”