With rapid population growth in urban areas, major cities around the world face increasingly complex and severe risks due to natural hazards. In particular, losses due to hydro-climatic disasters have considerably risen in recent years. Many metropolitan areas are located in especially vulnerable areas, where populations and high-value assets are concentrated. This challenge is increasingly recognized, and has been included as a Sustainable Development Goal to “Make cities and human settlements inclusive, safe, resilient and sustainable”. To inform these efforts, natural hazards research is crucial for developing new approaches for comprehensive risk analysis and mitigation.
This session aims to stimulate discussion of new challenges and potential solutions for metropolitan areas. Especially relevant are new approaches for multi-hazard risk analysis, effective disaster response and risk mitigation, and managing residual risk. We encourage research that incorporates broad disciplinary knowledge from fields such as civil engineering, climate science, hydrology, economics, public policy, and sociology. Topics of interest include:
- Comprehensive risk assessment methods based on multi-hazard, multi-scale and multi-process models
- Analyses of disaster losses that encompass property and infrastructure damage in addition to broader economic and social impacts;
- Integrated approaches for disaster response and emergency assistance;
- Post-disaster recovery and reconstruction based on environment carrying capacity and resilience;
- Novel mitigation actions and risk prevention strategies;
- Risk sharing strategies, including insurance (traditional or index-based) and catastrophe bonds.