Seite - 417 - in Biodiversity and Health in the Face of Climate Change

417 at an institutional scale whose authoritative reach does not correspond with the geo- graphical scale or particular spatial dynamics of a (…) problem”. However, despite the complex nature of urban systems, there exist relatively simple universal laws that are useful to be aware of when designing systems of gov- ernance for urban health resilience. One refers to the urban scaling effect and simi- larly counts for living organisms. It says that the bigger the organisation becomes, the less energy per capita is needed. For cities, this means that with a doubling of population size, energy supply, for example, increases sublinearly by 85% (one pet- rol station can serve more people), implying an economy of scale savings effect of 15% for energy and infrastructure. With regard to average wages, the amount of crime and incidence of infectious diseases, the number of patents produced, or the number of restaurants, there is a superlinear scaling effect of 1.15, manifesting sys- tematic increasing returns to scale (West 2017, Bettencourt et  al. 2010). 18.2 Climate Change Aggravating Existing Urban Complexity Demographic and technological changes have resulted in anthropogenic forces on the climate system, greatly exacerbating the flow of energy and materials within urban systems, increasing the complexity levels of urban systems and their func- tions. In addition, climate change aggravates the complexity of urban systems by imposing direct and indirect impacts on the urban system variables and their func- tions. Climate change effects include increased intensities and frequency of rainfall, droughts, storms and heat waves, due to warmer sea and land surface temperatures, rising sea levels and reduction of albedo, which further exacerbates the warming, and a range of climate uncertainty. These effects challenge the sensitivity of each variable of the urban social-ecological systems and subsystems (da Silva et  al. 2012). The geo-demographical change shows an overall trend of increasing popula- tion in increasingly multi- and intercultural urban areas, which challenges the already precarious concept of sustainability of urban systems. The different magni- tudes of climate change, therefore, accelerate and complicate both the general and specified resilience of urban systems of multiple scales. Resilience as a concept has been argued frequently for the case of climate change for the reasons presented above. It is also primarily referred to as the adaptation of climate change impacts. As urban systems are composed of complex environments in which ecological, social, cultural and economic factors interact on multiple scales and across different subsystems, climate change imposes not only direct impacts on the grey, green and blue infrastructure in urban systems, basic life support functions and manufactured goods, such as food, water, energy, transportation and their man- agement and provision, but also indirect impacts on the health and well-being of urban dwellers. Therefore, we argue that health should be an end goal of climate change adaptation and a proxy to examine the level of resilience of complex urban 18 Resilience Management for  Healthy Cities in  a  Changing Climate