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Adapting to Climate Sensitive Hazards through Architecture  

Allison Hoadley Anderson

In architecture, mitigation reduces the magnitude of climate change by reducing demand for resources; anticipatory adaptation improves performance against hazards; and planned adaptation creates policies and codes to support adaptation. Adaptation prepares for a future with intensifying climate conditions. The built environment must prepare for challenges that may be encountered during the service life of the building, and reduce human exposure to hazards. Structures are responsible for about 39% of the primary energy consumption worldwide and 24% of the greenhouse gas emissions, significantly contributing to the causes of climate change. Measures to reduce demand in the initial construction and over the life cycle of the building operation directly impact the climate. Improving performance against hazards requires a suite of modifications to counter specific threats. Adaptation measures may address higher temperatures, extreme precipitation, stormwater flooding, sea-level rise, hurricanes, drought, soil subsidence, wildfires, extended pest ranges, and multiple hazards. Because resources to meet every threat are inadequate, actions with low costs now which offer high benefits under a range of predicted future climates become high-priority solutions. Disaster risk is also reduced by aligning policies for planning and construction with anticipated hazards. Climate adaptation policies based on the local effects of climate change are a new tool to communicate risk and share resources. Building codes establish minimum standards for construction, so incorporating adaptation strategies into codes ensures that the resulting structures will survive a range of uncertain futures.

Article

Evolution of Strategic Flood Risk Management in Support of Social Justice, Ecosystem Health, and Resilience  

Paul Sayers

Throughout history, flood management practice has evolved in response to flood events. This heuristic approach has yielded some important incremental shifts in both policy and planning (from the need to plan at a catchment scale to the recognition that flooding arises from multiple sources and that defenses, no matter how reliable, fail). Progress, however, has been painfully slow and sporadic, but a new, more strategic, approach is now emerging. A strategic approach does not, however, simply sustain an acceptable level of flood defence. Strategic Flood Risk Management (SFRM) is an approach that relies upon an adaptable portfolio of measures and policies to deliver outcomes that are socially just (when assessed against egalitarian, utilitarian, and Rawlsian principles), contribute positively to ecosystem services, and promote resilience. In doing so, SFRM offers a practical policy and planning framework to transform our understanding of risk and move toward a flood-resilient society. A strategic approach to flood management involves much more than simply reducing the chance of damage through the provision of “strong” structures and recognizes adaptive management as much more than simply “wait and see.” SFRM is inherently risk based and implemented through a continuous process of review and adaptation that seeks to actively manage future uncertainty, a characteristic that sets it apart from the linear flood defense planning paradigm based upon a more certain view of the future. In doing so, SFRM accepts there is no silver bullet to flood issues and that people and economies cannot always be protected from flooding. It accepts flooding as an important ecosystem function and that a legitimate ecosystem service is its contribution to flood risk management. Perhaps most importantly, however, SFRM enables the inherent conflicts as well as opportunities that characterize flood management choices to be openly debated, priorities to be set, and difficult investment choices to be made.

Article

Involving People in Informal Settlements in Natural Hazards Governance Based on South African Experience  

Catherine Sutherland

Natural hazard governance in countries in the Global South is shifting from a state-centered approach, which has predominantly focused on disaster risk management, with limited involvement of citizens, and a disaster response to a hazard event, to an approach which is more participatory, inclusive and proactive. This emerging approach aims to be transformative, as it draws on the knowledge and skills of multiple actors, including community members; focuses on risk reduction and adaptation; and builds new models of participatory risk governance at the local and city scale. Progressive legislation has played a major role in supporting this evolution toward a more transformative approach to natural hazard governance, which recognizes the political economy and political ecology of risk. This includes acknowledging the vulnerability of communities in particular contexts, and the need to address development deficits to build resilience in the face of natural hazards. However, a significant gap exists between progressive legislation and policy, and implementation. Informal settlements experience some of the worst impacts of natural hazards due to their exposure, vulnerability, and social and political marginalization. However, they are also resilient and adaptive, developing innovative approaches in partnership with the state and other actors, to plan for and respond to natural hazards. Empirical research on particular case studies where these shifts in governance are evident, is necessary to explore the opportunities for and barriers to transformative, participatory natural hazard governance in cities in the South.

Article

Relocation due to Climate Change  

Vicki M. Bier and Susan B. King

Coastal flooding due to sea-level rise associated with climate change is likely to lead to long-term relocation (as opposed to short-term evacuation) of sizable populations from at-risk areas. Flooding has major adverse effects on the people affected by it, making it advantageous for people to relocate proactively (before experiencing major flooding) rather than only in the aftermath of flooding. However, relocation itself can also be associated with significant hardship, both financial and otherwise, making planning and assistance important in facilitating relocation. Several social and cultural factors, including social capital and social cohesion, can affect the extent to which vulnerable populations are resilient to the risk of disasters such as flooding. A number of actions and planning efforts can enhance resilience and minimize adverse impacts of both flooding and relocation. These include planning efforts to reduce the need for relocation in at-risk areas, economic incentives to facilitate and encourage voluntary relocation, assistance to support people in preparing for relocation, and planning to accommodate relocatees in possible receiving communities. In particular, receiving communities will need to deal with considerations of housing availability. In all of these processes, special attention is needed to effectively address issues of equity (e.g., difficulties experienced by low-income or less educated individuals in accessing available aid) as well as differing levels of community administrative capacity. Finally, disaster planning has historically focused primarily on the needs of homeowners; further attention to the needs of renters is therefore needed. Many of these tasks require leadership and coordination at the national and state levels (e.g., to review and possibly redesign assistance and financial-aid programs for disaster preparedness and recovery to improve equity).

Article

Natural Hazards, Climate Change, and Indigenous Knowledge and Stewardship: Moving Toward a Resilience-Based Model  

William Nikolakis, Victoria Gay, Russell Myers Ross, and Aimee Nygaard

The increased frequency and intensity of natural hazards associated with climate change represents a major risk to Indigenous peoples . Yet, the existing vulnerability-based model of natural hazard mitigation and adaptation is reactive and largely treats Indigenous peoples as “vulnerable”—passive actors, whose knowledge and stewardship are typically ignored. To meaningfully mitigate and adapt to the increasing impacts of changing climates, a transformation is required towards a proactive and holistic resilience-based model, grounded in Indigenous knowledge and stewardship. A resilience-based model empowers Indigenous peoples to proactively steward their lands towards health as the primary goal, thus reducing ecosystem vulnerability, and in doing so, community members strengthen their connection to the land and enhance their identity and agency, with documented positive health and well-being outcomes. Transitioning to a resilience-based approach requires structured learning and action-based approaches that treat resilience as both a process and an outcome, and strengthened in a positive cycle. Four interdependent elements are important to catalyze a resilience-based approach: (a) devolving stewardship to Indigenous Peoples , guided by Indigenous knowledge; (b) strengthening localized governance, in ways consistent with local values; (c) adequately resourcing stewardship and governance; and (d) monitoring and evaluating stewardship using “transdisciplinary” approaches that draw from Indigenous and Western knowledge systems in respectful ways, and to guide stewardship.

Article

Megacity Disaster Risk Governance  

James K. Mitchell

Megacity disaster risk governance is a burgeoning interdisciplinary field that seeks to encourage improved public decision-making about the safety and sustainability of the world’s largest urban centers in the face of environmental threats ranging from floods, storms, earthquakes, wildfires, and pandemics to the multihazard challenges posed by human-forced climate change. It is a youthful, lively, contested, ambitious and innovative endeavor that draws on research in three separate but overlapping areas of inquiry: disaster risks, megacities, and governance. Toward the end of the 20th century, each of these fields underwent major shifts in thinking that opened new possibilities for action. First, the human role in disaster risks came to the fore, giving increased attention to humans as agents of risk creation and providing increased scope for inputs from social sciences and humanities. Second, the scale, complexity, and political–economic salience of very large cities attained high visibility, leading to recognition that they are also sites of unprecedented risks, albeit with significant differences between rapidly growing poorer cities and slower growing affluent ones. Third, the concept of public decision-making expanded beyond its traditional association with actions of governments to include contributions from a wide range of nongovernmental groups that had not previously played prominent roles in public affairs. At least three new conceptions of megacity disaster risk governance emerged out of these developments. They include adaptive risk governance, smart city governance, and aesthetic governance. Adaptive risk governance focuses on capacities of at-risk communities to continuously adjust to dynamic uncertainties about future states of biophysical environments and human populations. It is learning-centered, collaborative, and nimble. Smart city governance seeks to harness the capabilities of new information and communication technologies, and their associated human institutions, to the increasingly automated tasks of risk anticipation and response. Aesthetic governance privileges the preferences of social, scientific, design, or political elites and power brokers in the formulation and execution of policies that bear on risks. No megacity has yet comprehensively or uniformly adopted any of these risk governance models, but many are experimenting with various permutations and hybrid variations that combine limited applications with more traditional administrative practices. Arrangements that are tailor-made to fit local circumstances are the norm. However, some version of adaptive risk governance seems to be the leading candidate for wider adoption, in large part because it recognizes the need to continuously accommodate new challenges as environments and societies change and interact in ways that are difficult to predict. Although inquiries are buoyant, there remain many unanswered questions and unaddressed topics. These include the differential vulnerability of societal functions that are served by megacities and appropriate responses thereto; the nature and biases of risk information transfers among different types of megacities; and appropriate ways of tackling ambiguities that attend decision-making in megacities. Institutions of megacity disaster risk governance will take time to evolve. Whether that process can be speeded up and applied in time to stave off the worst effects of the risks that lie ahead remains an open question.

Article

Hazards, Social Resilience, and Safer Futures  

Lena Dominelli

The concepts of hazards and risks began in engineering when scientists were measuring the points at which materials would become sufficiently stressed by the pressures upon them that they would break. These concepts migrated into the environmental sciences to assess risk in the natural terrain, including the risks that human activities posed to the survival of animals (including fish in streams) and plants in the biosphere. From there, they moved to the social sciences, primarily in formal disaster discourses. With the realization that modern societies constantly faced risks cushioned in uncertainties within everyday life, the media popularized the concept of risk and its accoutrements, including mitigation, adaptation, and preventative measures, among the general populace. A crucial manifestation of this is the media’s accounts of the risks affecting different groups of people or places contracting Covid-19, which burst upon a somnambulant world in December 2019 in Wuhan, China. The World Health Organization (WHO) declared Covid-19 a pandemic on March 11, 2020. Politicians of diverse hues sought to reassure nervous inhabitants that they had followed robust, scientific advice on risks to facilitate “flattening the curve” by spreading the rate of infection in different communities over a longer period to reduce demand for public health services. Definitions of hazard, risk, vulnerability, and resilience evolved as they moved from the physical sciences into everyday life to reassure edgy populations that their social systems, especially the medical ones, could cope with the demands of disasters. While most countries have managed the risk Covid-19 posed to health services, this has been at a price that people found difficult to accept. Instead, as they reflected upon their experiences of being confronted with the deaths of many loved ones, especially among elders in care homes; adversities foisted upon the disease’s outcomes by existing social inequalities; and loss of associative freedoms, many questioned whether official mitigation strategies were commensurate with apparent risks. The public demanded an end to such inequities and questioned the bases on which politicians made their decisions. They also began to search for certainties in the social responses to risk in the hopes of building better futures as other institutions, schools, and businesses went into lockdown, and social relationships and people’s usual interactions with others ceased. For some, it seemed as if society were crumbling around them, and they wanted a better version of their world to replace the one devastated by Covid-19 (or other disasters). Key to this better version was a safer, fairer, more equitable and reliable future. Responses to the risks within Covid-19 scenarios are similar to responses to other disasters, including earthquakes, volcanic eruptions, wildfires, tsunamis, storms, extreme weather events, and climate change. The claims of “building back better” are examined through a resilience lens to determine whether such demands are realizable, and if not, what hinders their realization. Understanding such issues will facilitate identification of an agenda for future research into mitigation, adaptation, and preventative measures necessary to protect people and the planet Earth from the harm of subsequent disasters.