Dynamic cities and disaster risk: Capturing the complexity within risk models
identify · cities · risk assessment
Urbanisation is occurring rapidly in many places – 43 cities are expected to exceed 10 million people by 2030, with 2.5 billion people added to urban areas by 2050.
Increasing urbanization manifests in
1) expansion of the urban area, resulting in change in land use as undeveloped land is developed, and
2) infill, as open space is developed and building density is increased to raise the density of the city. While these effects are known, we have not adequately and routinely been able to quantify the changes in disaster risk due to urbanisation and incorporate these dynamics into disaster risk management practices.
This event provides interactive exploration of how different components of urban development influence disaster risk. Participants will have the (guided) opportunity to parameterise and run a risk model to explore the influence of factors such as changing building density and urban expansion, their impacts on the local environment and potentially on hazards, as well as the distribution and characteristics of the building stock. Participants will, in turn, experience the impact of these changes on disaster risk.
Participants will gain practical and memorable insight into how risk can be influenced by changes to urban areas, and an understanding of the varying influence of different factors. They will participate in discussion of the influences on future risk, and prospective disaster risk reduction actions. Participants should have a background in the basic concepts of disaster risk and a desire to further explore the factors influencing future urban disaster risk.
Organizer: University of Adelaide
Partner organizations: GFDRR; Nanyang Technical University, ; Research Institute for Knowledge Systems (RIKS); University of Oxford (ECI)