Transforming Development and Disaster Risk

Risk justice: Boosting the contribution of risk management to sustainable development

Comprehensively addressing different aspects of justice is essential to enable risk management to contribute to sustainable development. This article offers a new conceptual framework called risk justice that comprises procedural, distributive, and corrective justice in four dimensions related to sustainable development: social, ecological, spatial, and temporal issues. Risk justice is defined as the quality of being fair and reasonable while governing and managing a possible negative event. After explaining the conceptual framework, a detailed content analysis of two international guidelines for disaster risk management (the Sendai Framework for Disaster Risk Reduction 2015-2030 and the European Floods Directive) illustrates the analytical potential of the risk justice framework. Findings show strong emphasis on social and spatial aspects of distributive and procedural justice in the two documents, whereas considerations of corrective justice and temporal and ecological issues are scarce or indirect. This may result in conflicting impacts of disaster risk management on sustainable development. Therefore, discussing risk management with a risk justice viewpoint while elaborating guidelines or choosing risk management strategies provides new avenues for sustainable development and facilitates transparent trade-offs. Our risk justice framework enables risk practitioners and researchers to reflect systemically about justice in risk management in different risk contexts and can be used both as a proactive and as a retrospective tool.

The Resilient Community: Strengthening People-Centered Disaster Risk Reduction in the Merapi Volcano Community, Java, Indonesia

Local communities generally play a crucial role during a disaster, so their involvement in pre-disaster capacity development may prove beneficial in the face of a disaster threat. Thus, People-Centered Disaster Risk Reduction (PCDRR) programs could enable communities living in disaster-prone areas to become more resilient. This study examines how relationships among individual attributes of the community (and their pre-event Disaster Risk Reduction (DRR) context (risk knowledge, information access, and network and stakeholders) could give insight into how communities can be transformed to make them more resilient in the case of the Merapi Volcano community. Based on data collected through online survey platform by non-probability sampling, this study uses non-parametric goodness fit tests and parametric regression to assess the dependencies between various indicators and find the predictor variables. The findings indicate that the individual attributes of the Merapi Volcano community, as perceived through the pre-event DRR context has led to a better understanding of the function of people exposure to prepare more people-centered preparedness and disaster mitigation. However, since the sub-variables did not show any significance for being predictors, this implies that, even though there is a significant reliance between the pre-event DRR context and the individual attributes, the individual attribute could be regarded more as a modifier than a predictor.

A Framework for Scaling Urban Transformative Resilience Through Utilizing Volunteered Geographic Information

Resilience in the urban context can be described as a continuum of absorptive, adaptive, and transformative capacities. The need to move toward a sustainable future and bounce forward after any disruption has led recent urban resilience initiatives to engage with the concept of transformative resilience when and where conventional and top-down resilience initiatives are less likely to deliver effective strategies, plans, and implementable actions. Transformative resilience pathways emphasize the importance of reflexive governance, inclusive co-creation of knowledge, innovative and collaborative learning, and self-organizing processes. To support these transformative pathways, considering techno-social co-evolution and digital transformation, using new data sources such as Volunteered Geographic Information (VGI) and crowdsourcing are being promoted. However, a literature review on VGI and transformative resilience reveals that a comprehensive understanding of the complexities and capacities of utilizing VGI for transformative resilience is lacking. Therefore, based on a qualitative content analysis of available resources, this paper explores the key aspects of using VGI for transformative resilience and proposes a comprehensive framework structured around the identified legal, institutional, social, economic, and technical aspects to formalize the process of adopting VGI in transformative resilience initiatives.

Transformation towards Risk-Sensitive Urban Development: A Systematic Review of the Issues and Challenges

Risk-sensitive urban development is an innovative planning approach that can transform the way cities are built in order to face the uncertainties that arise from climate-induced disaster risks. However, the potential to initiate such a transformative approach has not materialized because of the many underlying issues that need to be understood properly. Therefore, this study conducted a systematic review to gather empirical evidence on the issues and challenges in implementing risk-sensitive urban development. The study identified forty-six issues and challenges under seven key themes that need addressing in order to facilitate the desirable transition: trade-offs, governance, fragmentation and silos, capacity, design and development, data, and funding. The issues and challenges that exist under trade-offs for negotiating solutions for risk-sensitive urban development and the governance of multiple stakeholders were identified as the top two areas that need attention in facilitating the desirable transition. This study also revealed that important information, such as scientific information, hazard and risk information, temporal and spatial information, and critical local details are not being produced and shared between stakeholders in decision-making. A profound participatory process that involves all the stakeholders in the decision-making process was identified as the pathway to ensure equitable outcomes in risk-sensitive urban development.

Rethinking the interplay between affluence and vulnerability to aid climate change adaptive capacity

Affluence and vulnerability are often seen as opposite sides of a coin-with affluence generally understood as reducing forms of vulnerability through increased resilience and adaptive capacity. However, in the context of climate change and an increase in associated hazards and disasters, we suggest the need to re-examine this dynamic relationship-a complex association we define here as the Affluence-Vulnerability Interface (AVI). We review research in different national contexts to show how a more nuanced understanding of the AVI can (a) problematize the notion that increasing material affluence necessarily has a mitigating influence on social vulnerability, (b) extend our analysis of social vulnerability beyond low-income regions to include affluent contexts and (c) improve our understanding of how psychosocial characteristics influence people's vulnerability. Finally, we briefly outline three methodological approaches that we believe will assist future engagement with the AVI.

Challenges in Implementing Sendai Framework for Disaster Risk Reduction in Poland

Currently, weather conditions and extreme weather are becoming more frequent and more intense. Along with climate change, the vulnerability of society and individual regions to the risk of various types of threats also increases. The objectives of “The Sendai Framework for Disaster Risk Reduction 2015–2030”, are the first global political frameworks of the United Nations program designed for the period post-2015. The original priority objectives of the Framework are: Understanding disaster risk, strengthening disaster risk governance to manage disaster risk, investing in disaster risk reduction for resilience, and enhancing disaster preparedness for effective response, and to “Build Back Better” in recovery, rehabilitation, and reconstruction. The provisions contained in the document are an essential step towards building global political coherence with an apparent reference to health, development, and climate change. The article is briefly reporting current Disaster Risk Reduction related programs and policies in Poland, contributions as part of The Sendai Framework for Disaster Risk Reduction implementation, and its challenges.

Using RISKPLAN for Earthquake Risk Assessment in Sichuan Province, China

Sichuan Province of China is a prominent population and economic growth center as well as an earthquake-stricken region. A sound understanding of the seismic risk that Sichuan Province is facing is useful to raise risk awareness, achieve disaster risk reduction (DRR), and guarantee sustainable socio-economic development. Earthquake risk assessment is the first step in these efforts. This study strives to demonstrate the feasibility of applying an integrated earthquake risk assessment in Sichuan Province of China using RISKPLAN, a risk evaluation tool of natural hazards developed by the Swiss Federal Office for the Environment (FOEN). The time and location of seismic events in Sichuan were incorporated into three scenarios and calculated with respect to expected losses under different assumed conditions of earthquake occurrence, such as the recurrence interval and magnitude. Furthermore, cost-effectiveness calculations were made regarding the various possible scenarios to assess the ratio of expected losses and the required financial means for prevention and mitigation measures against the effects of seismic activities in Sichuan. Our results show that when the magnitude of the seismic event is greater than expected, reduction and mitigation investments for a possible earthquake risk will be all the more rewarding.

A Study of Supply Chain Risk in the Brazilian Wind Power Projects by Interpretive Structural Modeling and MICMAC Analysis

This paper aims to present an approach to the supply chain risk modeling of Brazilian wind power projects. Risk factors were assessed by literature review and analysis through the Interpretive Structural Modeling (ISM) and the Matrix-based Multiplication Applied to a Classification (MICMAC) methodologies, with a group of professionals of the field. The ISM model represented the relationships between twenty-two risk factors, and their position in the system, from higher to lower-level risks. The MICMAC analysis identified independent, autonomous, linkage and dependent risk factors according to their driving and dependence power. Data collected also allowed for the recognition of indirect influences between risk factors, complementing the system’s understanding, in special the strongest linkages. The paper also integrated both outputs to create a better representation of the risks factors into the system. The research characterizes current risk factors’ status on the Brazilian wind power supply chain, and the understanding of their implications into the system. It is a guide to implement effective mitigation strategies into the supply chain and more accurate and cautious decision-making in organizations.

Is Jakarta’s New Flood Risk Reduction Strategy Transformational?

On a conceptual and normative level, the debate around transformation in the context of disaster risk reduction and climate change adaptation has been rising sharply over the recent years. Yet, whether and how transformation occurs in the messy realities of policy and action, and what separates it from other forms of risk reduction, is far from clear. Jakarta appears to be the perfect example to study these questions. It is amongst the cities with the highest flood risk in the world. Its flood hazard is driven by land subsidence, soil sealing, changes in river discharge, and—increasingly—sea level rise. As all of these trends are set to continue, Jakarta’s flood hazard is expected to intensify in the future. Designing and implementing large-scale risk reduction and adaption measures therefore has been a priority of risk practitioners and policy-makers at city and national level. Against this background, the paper draws on a document analysis and original empirical household survey data to review and evaluate current adaptation measures and to analyze in how far they describe a path that is transformational from previous risk reduction approaches. The results show that the focus is clearly on engineering solutions, foremost in the Giant Sea Wall project. The project is likely to transform the city’s flood hydrology. However, it cements rather than transforms the current risk management paradigm which gravitates around the goal of controlling flood symptoms, rather than addressing their largely anthropogenic root causes. The results also show that the planned measures are heavily contested due to concerns about ecological impacts, social costs, distributional justice, public participation, and long-term effectiveness. On the outlook, the results therefore suggest that the more the flood hazard intensifies in the future, the deeper a societal debate will be needed about the desired pathway in flood risk reduction and overall development planning—particularly with regards to the accepted levels of transformation, such as partial retreat from the most flood-affected areas.

Towards Risk-Sensitive and Transformative Urban Development in Sub Saharan Africa

Risk-sensitive urban development is required to reduce accumulated risk and to better consider risk when planning new developments. To deliver a sustainable city for all requires a more frank and comprehensive focus on procedure: On who makes decisions, under which frameworks, based upon what kind of data or knowledge, and with what degree and direction of accountability? Acting on these procedural questions is the promise of transformative urban development. This paper explores the status of risk sensitive and transformative urban development and the scope for transition towards these components of sustainability in urban sub-Saharan Africa through the lens of diverse city cases: Karonga (Malawi), Ibadan (Nigeria), Niamey (Niger) and Nairobi (Kenya). The paper draws from a 3-year research and capacity building programme called Urban Africa: Risk Knowledge that aims to address gaps in data, understandings and capacity to break cycles of risk accumulation. A common analytical framework is presented to help identify blockages and opportunities for transition towards a risk-sensitive and transformative urban development. This framework is then illustrated through each city in turn and a concluding discussion reflects on city observations to draw out recommendations for city level and wider action and research partnerships.