The global interconnection of social systems often causes hazard impacts to exceed regional boundaries or socioeconomic sectors, propagating and amplifying their losses. In turn, successful disaster risk reduction and climate adaptation strategies engage citizens and stakeholders to attune to their conditions, capacities, and context. Urban areas are especially vulnerable to hazards, as they act as nodes in global networks, locate in exposed settings (e.g., in coastal areas or mountain slopes), and concentrate physical and social assets. Intensifying urbanisation trends and climatic change mean these positive and detrimental interactions will increase.
This session provides a forum for research that integrates citizens' and stakeholders’ knowledge in risk analysis and governance. We aim to collect recent scientific advances in the multifaceted societal contributions to climate vulnerability, exposure, and risk assessment and reduction. We are particularly interested in research that bridges participatory methods with risk assessment and policy development, including crowdsourcing risk information, volunteered geographic information, citizen and participatory science, and the integration of local and non-academic knowledge in scientific investigations. Additionally, we welcome other relevant applications of participatory research and policymaking in disaster risk assessment and reduction, and climate adaptation.
We call for experiences in citizen-centred and science-based research and policy, bringing evidence on:
- Transdisciplinary approaches and integrative methods in vulnerability and risk analysis, disaster risk reduction, and climate adaptation that combine knowledge from both academic and non-academic stakeholders.
- Innovative methods and data sources that leverage citizen and stakeholder knowledge into risk frameworks, including mixed methods research and non-academic knowledge integration with remote sensing, climate models, simulations, machine learning, and similar technologies.
- The interaction between societal dynamics and natural hazards, including the influence of urban development on the occurrence and impact of single and multiple natural hazards.
- Case studies and lessons learned that demonstrate the active involvement of citizens and other stakeholders in the design or the implementation of risk assessment frameworks, risk mitigation strategies, and governance actions.