Risk-Informed Sustainable Development in the Urban Tropics

Dear Colleagues,

The cities of the Tropics are exposed to multiple hazards that are rarely present in other climatic zones. The Tropics contain the greatest heterogeneity of economies—a condition that should facilitate the exchange of best practices to face similar hydro-climatic threats. However, we still know too little about (1) how the principles set out in the Sendai Framework for Disaster Risk Reduction (2015) have been accepted and implemented by local governments and (2) which obstacles and which best practices have surfaced in recent years. Hazards trend under the effect of climate change and variability are still little investigated in the large cities of the Tropics. Exceptions aside, the dynamics of settlements in risk areas remain poorly understood. The case studies that have so far investigated the impacts of natural disasters on the reproduction of urban poverty are at their initial stages. Risk assessments tend to view the context as stationary. Residual risk and the efficiency of risk treatment often remain unknown. Few studies have investigated whether early warning systems are effective and whether the deficiencies depend on the poorly participated way in which they were designed. Despite these gaps, many cities are adopting stand-alone risk reduction plans, while others have preferred to mainstream disaster risk reduction into existing plans. These practices should be known more thoroughly to facilitate their dissemination. Public participation and public–private partnership in the planning process, plan implementation, monitoring and evaluation are recurrent weaknesses of local planning. These aspects require more knowledge. Efforts to reduce risks have inadvertently built new ones. We would like to know if and how official development aid is facing the social reproduction of risk.

This Special Issue is focused on the local scale and local actors. We are looking for case studies (best practices), critical reviews, systematic reviews and innovative methodological contributions from different academic fields on a range of topics:

• Non-stationary approaches to floods;
• Exposure and risk dynamics;
• Socially constructed risk;
• Natural disaster–poverty nexus;
• Local climate scenarios;
• Early warning systems;
• Multi-hazard risk assessments;
• Risk treatment efficiency;
• Risk reduction plans;
• Risk management;
• Mainstreaming risk reduction into local plans;
• Public–private partnership in disaster risk reduction;
• Public participation in disaster risk reduction;
• Tracking risk reduction plans.

References

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Prof. Dr. Maurizio Tiepolo
Prof. Dr. Alessandro Pezzoli
Guest Editors

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