Urban Risk Reduction and Adaptation: How to promote resilient communities and adapt to increasing disasters and changing climatic conditions?

Climate change and disasters are among today?s most pressing issues. The damage caused by the worldwide increase in disasters is staggering, with the urban poor being most at risk. Disasters make their already precarious living conditions worse, creating a vicious circle of poverty. More and more attention has thus been given to the need to address changing climatic conditions and disaster risk through development work. Despite related efforts, urban development actors still struggle to effectively reduce risk in their daily work. This book seeks to demonstrate how disaster risk management and adaptation could be better integrated into urban development planning (i.e. social housing, slum upgrading and urban governance programmes). Based on the identification of the nexus between disasters and urban development and of the incomplete approaches to risk reduction and its mainstreaming, a comprehensive adaptation framework is presented. The book should be of interest to policymakers, academics and practitioners working in development planning and reconstruction who face the challenge of addressing disasters, ever-increasing risk, and vulnerability to climate change.