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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.

This is an advance summary of a forthcoming article in the Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Natural Hazard Science. Please check back later for the full article.

Fragile states have historically experienced a disproportionate amount of natural disaster-related losses. For example, from 2005 to 2009 more than 50% of those impacted by a natural disaster lived in a fragile state, resulting in over $200 billion in combined losses. Despite myriad descriptions and indicators used to define a fragile state, there is consensus across the international community that a fragile state can be described as lacking the ability to maintain physical control of territorial boundaries, provide basic public services, and facilitate economic growth. When natural disasters occur in such areas, they exacerbate already weak governance structures and further undermine their governments’ capability to respond to the crisis while simultaneously addressing challenges related to poverty and conflict. To remedy these and other complex issues inherent in fragile states, policymakers are beginning to recognize the importance of effective agency coordination and cross-sector collaboration. Agency coordination, in the context of natural disaster response, can be described as the integration of facilities, equipment, personnel, and communication by public agencies for supporting incident response activities. Cross-sector collaboration can be defined as the sharing of information and resources by organizations in two or more sectors to achieve an outcome that cannot be achieved by organizations in one sector alone. Such organizational sectors include government, businesses, nonprofits, communities, and the public. Because forecasts suggest that natural disaster-related losses will only increase in fragile states due to population growth, urbanization, and climate change, there is a pressing need to understand the ways public organizations not only coordinate before, during, and after a natural disaster, but also how they collaborate across organizational sectors.

This is an advance summary of a forthcoming article in the Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Natural Hazard Science. Please check back later for the full article.

Flooding of rivers and coastlines is the most frequent and damaging of all natural hazards. Between 1980 and 2013, total direct damages exceeded $1 trillion, and at least 220,000 people lost their lives. Events with major economic losses include the 2011 flooding in Thailand ($40 billion) and the 2013 Central Europe floods ($16 billion). Flooding also triggers great humanitarian challenges. The 2015 Malawi floods were the worst in the country’s history and were followed by food shortages across large parts of the country.

Flood losses are increasing rapidly in some world regions, driven by economic development in floodplains and increases in extreme precipitation events and global sea level due to climate change. The biggest increase in flood losses is seen in low-income countries, where population growth is rapid and many cities are expanding quickly. At the same time, evidence shows that adaptation to flood risk is already happening, and that a large proportion of losses can be successfully contained by effective risk management strategies. Such risk management strategies may include floodplain zoning, construction and maintenance of flood defenses, reforestation of land draining into rivers, and use of early warning systems.

To reduce risk effectively, it is important to know the location and impact of potential floods, under current and future social and environmental conditions. In a risk assessment, models can be used to map the flow of water over land after an intense rainfall event or storm surge (the “hazard”). Modeled for many different potential events, this provides estimates of potential inundation depth in flood prone areas. Such maps can be constructed for different scenarios of climate change, based on changes in rainfall, temperature, and sea levels specified in climate change scenarios.

To assess the impact of the modeled hazard, that is, the cost of damage or lives lost, exposure (including buildings, population, and infrastructure) must be mapped using land-use and population density data, as well as construction information. Population growth and urban expansion can be simulated by increasing the density or extent of the urban area in the model. The effects of flood on people and on types of buildings and infrastructure are determined using a vulnerability function. This indicates the damage expected to occur to a structure (or group of people) as a function of flood intensity (i.e., inundation depth and flow velocity).

Potential adaptation measures such as land-use change or new flood defenses can be included in the model, to understand how effective they may be in reducing flood risk. This way, risk assessments can demonstrate the possible approaches available to policy makers to build a less risky future.

Economic resilience, in its static form, refers to utilizing remaining resources efficiently to maintain functionality of a household, business, industry, or entire economy after a disaster strikes, and, in its dynamic form, to effectively investing in repair and reconstruction to promote accelerated recovery. As such, economic resilience is oriented to implementing various post-disaster actions (tactics) to reduce business interruption (BI), in contrast to pre-disaster actions such as mitigation that are primarily oriented to preventing property damage. A number of static resilience tactics have been shown to be effective (e.g., conserving scarce inputs, finding substitutes from within and from outside the region, using inventories, and relocating activity to branch plants/offices or other sites). Efforts to measure the effectiveness of the various tactics are relatively new and aim to translate these estimates into dollar benefits, which can be juxtaposed to estimates of dollar costs of implementing the tactics. A comprehensive benefit-cost analysis can assist public- and private sector decision makers in determining the best set of resilience tactics to form an overall resilience strategy.

This is an advance summary of a forthcoming article in the Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Natural Hazard Science. Please check back later for the full article.

Children and youth are greatly affected by disasters, and as climate instability leads to more weather-related disasters, the risks to the youngest members of societies will continue to increase. Children are more likely to live in risky places, such as floodplains, coastal areas, and earthquake zones, and more likely to be poor than other groups of people. While children and youth in industrialized countries are experiencing increased risks, the children and youth in developing countries are the most at risk to disasters.

Children and youth are vulnerable before, during, and after a disaster. In a disaster, many children and youth experience simultaneous and ongoing disruptions in their families, schooling, housing, health and access to healthcare, friendships, and other key areas of their lives. Many are at risk to separation from guardians, long-term displacement, injury, illness, and even death. In disaster planning, there is often an assumption that parents will protect their children in a disaster event, and yet children are often separated from their parents when they are at school, childcare centers, home alone, with friends, and at work. Children do not have the resources or independence to prepare for disasters, so they are often reliant on adults to make evacuation decisions, secure shelter, and provide resources. Children also may hide or have trouble articulating their distress to adults after a disaster. In the disaster aftermath, it has been found that children and youth—no matter how personally resilient—cannot fully recover without the necessary resources and social support.

Social location—such as social class, race, gender, neighborhood, resources, and networks—prior to a disaster often determines, at least in part, many of the children’s post-disaster outcomes. In other words, age intersects with many other factors. Girls, for example, are at risk to sexual violence and exploitation in some disaster aftermath situations. In addition, a child’s experience in a disaster could also be affected by language, type of housing, immigration status, legal status, and disability issues. Those living in poverty have more difficulties preparing for disasters, do not have the resources to evacuate, and live in lower quality housing that is less able to withstand a disaster. Thus, it is crucial to consider the child’s environment before and after the disaster, to realize that some children experience cumulative vulnerability, or an accumulation of risk factors, and that disasters may occur on top of other crises, such as drought, epidemics, political instability, violence, or a family crisis such as divorce or death.

Even as children and youth are vulnerable, they also demonstrate important and often unnoticed capacities, skills, and strengths, as they assist themselves and others before and after disaster strikes. Frequently, children are portrayed as helpless, fragile, passive, and powerless. But children and youth are creative social beings and active agents, and they have played important roles in preparedness activities and recovery for their families and communities. Thus, both children’s vulnerabilities and capacities in disasters should be a research and policy priority.

Flood losses in the United States have increased dramatically over the course of the past century, averaging US$7.96 billion in damages per year for the 30-year period ranging from 1985 to 2014. In terms of human fatalities, floods are the second largest weather-related hazard in the United States, causing approximately 80 deaths per year over the same period. Given the wide-reaching impacts of flooding across the United States, the evaluation of flood-generating mechanisms and of the drivers of changing flood hazard are two areas of active research.

Flood frequency analysis has traditionally been based on statistical analyses of the observed flood distributions that rarely distinguish among physical flood-generating processes. However, recent scientific advances have shown that flood frequency distributions are often characterized by “mixed populations” arising from multiple flood-generating mechanisms, which can be challenging to disentangle. Flood events can be driven by a variety of physical mechanisms, including rain and snowmelt, frontal systems, monsoons, intense tropical cyclones, and more generic cyclonic storms.

Temporal changes in the frequency and magnitude of flooding have also been the subject of a large body of work in recent decades. The science has moved from a focus on the detection of trends and shifts in flood peak distributions towards the attribution of these changes, with particular emphasis on climatic and anthropogenic factors, including urbanization and changes in agricultural practices. A better understanding of these temporal changes in flood peak distributions, as well as of the physical flood-generating mechanisms, will enable us to move forward with the estimation of future flood design values in the context of both climatic and anthropogenic change.

Community-based approaches existed even before the existence of the state and its formal governance structure. People and communities used to help and take care of each other’s disaster needs. However, due to the evolution of state governance, new terminology of community-based disaster risk reduction (CBDRR) has been coined to help communities in an organized way. Different stakeholders are responsible for community-based actions; the two key players are the local governments and civil society, or nongovernment organizations. Private sector and academic and research institutions also play crucial roles in CBDRR. Many innovative CBDRR practices exist in the world, and it is important to analyze them and learn the common lessons. The key to community is its diversity, and this should be kept in mind for the CBDRR. There are different entry points and change agents based on the diverse community. It is important to identify the right change agent and entry point and to develop a sustainable mechanism to institutionalize CBDRR activities. Social networking needs to be incorporated for effective CBDRR.

This is an advance summary of a forthcoming article in the Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Natural Hazard Science. Please check back later for the full article.

While known to be important and essential for improved effectiveness and efficiency, cross-sector coordination and collaboration between different actors engaged in post-disaster recovery is fraught with complications. Among the challenges are: who leads and how; the capacity and roles of the host government; governance structures within organizations (which may differ a great deal); assumptions of power; trade-offs between valuing relationships and “getting the job done”; and the varying constraints (and opportunities) of accountability.

Recognizing the need to improve joint actions for a better response, the Humanitarian Reform Agenda (HRA), begun in 2005, led to the remolding of collective models of disaster response and the adoption of the global cluster system, essentially organized around the delivery of goods and services (sectors) by traditional aid actors (the United Nations, non-governmental organizations (NGOs), and the International Red Cross and Red Crescent Movement).

While the cluster system has largely been acknowledged as an improvement in collaboration between actors, a perennial challenge of cross-sector coordination remains. One of the opportunities for improvement lies in better and more predictable leadership, one of the key areas identified by the HRA. Another opportunity lies in changing the focus away from a supply-driven approach of prioritizing what aid providers deliver towards a demand-driven understanding, such as that offered by area-based approaches, wherein sectors are more closely aligned.

A common form of collaboration within aid is partnership between various actors (e.g., the UN, NGOs). Partnerships assume a relationship that is more than a constructing relationship: effective partnerships emphasize the need for transparency and equity alongside being results-oriented and competent. Recognizing this, The Grand Bargain, resulting from the World Humanitarian Summit, noted that aid providers should “engage with local and national responders in a spirit of partnership and aim to reinforce rather than replace local and national capacities”.

Partnerships, however, fall short all too often, especially when one partner has power over the other, which is often the case. The report Time to Let Go, from the think-tank the Overseas Development Institute (ODI) notes, for instance that, “the relationships between donor and implementer, aid provider and recipient, remain controlling and asymmetrical, and partnerships and interactions remain transactional and competitive, rather than reciprocal and collective.” The challenge remains to achieve the task in hand while at the same time engaging in effective collaborative mechanisms that value the nature of the relationship. If this is not achieved, effective post-disaster recovery can be jeopardized.

Emergency and disaster planning involves a coordinated, co-operative process of preparing to match urgent needs with available resources. The phases are research, writing, dissemination, testing, and updating. Hence, an emergency plan needs to be a living document that is periodically adapted to changing circumstances and that provides a guide to the protocols, procedures, and division of responsibilities in emergency response. Emergency planning is an exploratory process that provides generic procedures for managing unforeseen impacts and should use carefully constructed scenarios to anticipate the needs that will be generated by foreseeable hazards when they strike. Plans need to be developed for specific sectors, such as education, health, industry, and commerce. They also need to exist in a nested hierarchy that extends from the local emergency response (the most fundamental level), through the regional tiers of government, to the national and international levels. Failure to plan can be construed as negligence because it would involve failing to anticipate needs that cannot be responded to adequately by improvisation during an emergency.

Plans are needed, not only for responding to the impacts of disaster, but also to maintain business continuity while managing the crisis, and to guide recovery and reconstruction effectively. Dealing with disaster is a social process that requires public support for planning initiatives and participation by a wide variety of responders, technical experts and citizens. It needs to be sustainable in the light of challenges posed by non-renewable resource utilization, climate change, population growth, and imbalances of wealth. Although, at its most basic level, emergency planning is little more than codified common sense, the increasing complexity of modern disasters has required substantial professionalization of the field. This is especially true in light of the increasing role in emergency response of information and communications technology. Disaster planners and coordinators are resource managers, and in the future, they will need to cope with complex and sophisticated transfers of human and material resources. In a globalizing world that is subject to accelerating physical, social, and economic change, the challenge of managing emergencies well depends on effective planning and foresight, and the ability to connect disparate elements of the emergency response into coherent strategies.

As an urbanized river-dominated delta, New Orleans, Louisiana, ranks among the most experimental of cities, a test of whether the needs of a stable human settlement can coexist with the fluidity of a deltaic environment—and what happens when they do not.

That natural environment bestowed upon New Orleans numerous advantages, among them abundant fresh water, fertile soils, productive wetlands and, above all, expedient passage between maritime and continental realms. But with those advantages came exposure to potential hazards—an overflowing Mississippi River, a tempestuous Gulf of Mexico, sinking soils, eroding coasts, rising seas, biotic invasion, pestilence, political and racial discord, conflagration—made all the worse by the high levels of social vulnerability borne by all too many members of New Orleans’ population. More so than any other major metropolis on the North American continent, this history of disaster and response is about the future of New Orleans as much as it is about the past.

This article examines two dozen disasters of various types and scales, with origins oftentimes traceable to anthropogenic manipulation of the natural environment, and assesses the nature of New Orleans’ responses. It frames these assessments in the “risk triangle” framework offered by David Crichton and other researchers, which views urban risk as a function of hazard, exposure, and vulnerability. “Hazard” implies the disastrous event or trauma itself; “exposure” means human proximity to the hazard, usually in the form of settlement patterns, and “vulnerability” indicates individuals’ and communities’ ability to respond resiliently and adaptively—which itself is a function of education, income, age, race, language, social capital, and other factors—after having been exposed to a hazard.