Making cities resilient: From awareness to implementation

Posted on: 15 March 2013
By: mackene
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The latest issue of the International Journal of Disaster Resilience in the Built Environment  is a special issue entitled Making cities resilient: From awareness to implementation. This stemmed from the United Nations International Strategy for Disaster Reduction (UNISDR) campaign on Making Cities Resilient. To celebrate, the journal is currently free to access. This free access runs until 31st March 2013. Simply log in to the table of contents using the following access details: Username: IJDRBE, Password: emerald

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Urban planning for city leaders

Posted on: 12 March 2013
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Urban {Planning for City Leaders is a UN-Habitat initiative to provide local leaders and decision makers with the tools to support urban planning good practice. It aims to inform leaders about the value that urban planning could bring to their cities and to facilitate a collaborative dialogue between leaders, policy makers and planners about urban development. This guide offers practical advice in this respect.

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Policy making after disasters. Helping regions become resilient: The case of post-earthquake Abruzzo

Posted on: 11 March 2013
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This report suggests that the Abruzzo region of Italy should focus on endogenous resources to build its long-term development strategy and, at the same time, to increase the external openness of the regional system to attract more entrepreneurs, students, foreigners and external capital, following the earthquake of 2009. The issues raised in the report can help other governments to rethink regional policy, for both regions vulnerable to natural disasters and for those facing long-term decline. As such, eight guiding recommendations for building resilient regions after a disaster are drawn. These guiding recommendations can provide a framework for policy making in other OECD regions.

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Global Risks 2013

Posted on: 14 February 2013
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The World Economic Forum is now in its eighth year of publishing the Global Risks report. The purpose of the current edition is twofold. First, it aims to show how experts from around the world, from different backgrounds, currently perceive the risks that the world is likely to face over the next decade. To capture these opinions, a survey was carried out, interviews were conducted with specialists in different fields, and a series of workshops and conference sessions were held with expert groups to interpret the research findings and to work out the three risk cases developed in the report. Second, with this report the World Economic Forum aims to continue to raise awareness about global risks, to stimulate thinking about how risks can be factored into strategy development, and to challenge global leaders to improve how they approach global risks.

This year’s Special Report examines the increasingly important issue of building national resilience to global risks. It introduces qualitative and quantitative indicators to assess overall national resilience to global risks by looking at five national-level subsystems (economic, environmental, governance, infrastructure and social) through the lens of five components: robustness, redundancy, resourcefulness, response and recovery. The aim is to develop a future diagnostic report to enable decision-makers to track progress in building national resilience and possibly identify where further investments are needed.

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Investing in resilience: Ensuring a disaster-resistant future

Posted on: 8 February 2013
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A new report published by the Asian Development Bank (ADB) says that human and financial losses from natural disasters in Asia and the Pacific continue to grow. Yet, reducing such losses is possible through investments in risk assessment, risk reduction and residual risk management. The appropriate use of existing instruments and mechanisms in the legislative, regulatory, policy, planning, institutional, financial, and capacity-building arenas can increase resilience. Moreover, there is increasing awareness from decision makers of the need to build partnerships with all levels of society along with close cooperation with the international community. Disaster resilience is increasingly viewed as a critical component of efforts to achieve sustainable socioeconomic development and poverty reduction. In the context of increasing exposure and vulnerability to meteorological, hydrological and climate-related hazards associated with a changing climate, climate change adaptation also need to be combined with actions to strengthen disaster resilience under a single framework. This report contains an extensive bibliography.

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3 ways to build cities that withstand earthquakes and superstorms

Posted on: 31 January 2013
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The author argues that making our cities resilient to climate change means a shift away from the lowest-bid mentality and toward a model of shared risk.

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Keeping up with megatrends: The implications of climate change and urbanization for environmental emergency preparedness and response

Posted on: 24 January 2013
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This study examines the effects of  two megatrends, climate change and urbanization, on environmental emergencies. It considers how climate change and urbanization affect the scope and scale of emergencies, as well as what these trends mean for emergency preparedness and response.

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Disasters and environment: Science, preparedness and resilience. Washington, D.C., 15-17 January 2013

Posted on: 24 January 2013
By: mackene
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At this event over 1,200 leaders from the emergency response, scientific, policy, conservation, and business communities, as well as federal and local government officials, met to address themes such as cascading disasters, the intersection of the built and natural environments, disasters as mechanisms of ecosystem change, rethinking recovery and expanding the vision of mitigation, human behavior and its consequences. Articles and videos are available online.

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Toward Resilience: A Guide to Disaster Risk Reduction and Climate Change Adaptation

Posted on: 21 January 2013
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A group of development organisations have released a new introductory guide to help NGOs working in the development sector understand and integrate climate change adaptation and disaster risk reduction (DRR) into their project planning and programme cycle management. It is designed to be used as a practical resource for staff of development and humanitarian organizations working with people whose livelihoods and rights are threatened by disasters and climate change.

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Disaster Risk Reduction and Climate Change Adaptation in South Asia

Posted on: 18 January 2013
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START promotes research-driven capacity building to advance knowledge on global environmental change in Africa and Asia-Pacific. With funding from the Climate and Development Knowledge Network, START is supporting five interdisciplinary research teams to conduct research on integrating disaster risk reduction (DRR) and climate change adaptation (CCA) for resilient development in South Asia. Under this broad research theme, specific projects aim to address three sub-themes: Institutional arrangements and governance structures that influence the degree of flexibility and sustainability of DRR across varying scales; Policy innovations that promote convergence of DRR and CCA into policy and practice at varying scales; The changing nature of development factors, which shape vulnerability to disasters.

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