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Nepal's urban population is estimated to be around 15 percent. This is a tremendous increment considering that the urban population some 50 years back was just around 3 percent. The rapid increase in urban population in the last five decades has resulted in unplanned and haphazard urban growth. Urbanization causes a shift in employment, from the agricultural sector to the nonagricultural sector. However, in Nepal, despite the increase in the urban population, the economy is still largely dictated by the agricultural sector. Urbanization is creating and adding new risks to the existing risks from natural hazards such as earthquakes, landslides, and flooding. Building a culture of safety is the key to building resilience of communities to disasters and the involvement of the community in managing risks is instrumental in reducing the adverse impacts of these disasters. Public awareness in dealing with disasters and in responding to emergency situations can save a great number of lives.

In spite of increased investments in the area of disaster management in recent decades, the losses continue to mount. One of the emerging reasons for the current trend of increasing impacts of disasters is the unpredictability of natural hazard events coupled with the tendency of human settlements to move to vulnerable locations including coastal areas in search of economic gains. The urban areas are naturally the most affected due to concentration of habitat and resources. In the current context, it is impossible to make resistant urban growth. Instead, resilience is becoming more widely accepted, where certain vital infrastructures need to be resistant, but the urban systems need to be resilient enough to cope with the climate-related hazards. This book highlights the issues of resilience through regional, national, city- and community-based studies. The book shows how to enhance actions at local levels, and how the plans can be implemented through multistakeholder collaboration.

Risk reduction in cities of fast developing nations is both an opportunity and a big challenge. It is an opportunity because cities are considered efficient spatial forms of human habitation where smart interventions can be optimized. However, involvement and ownership of urban society is a big challenge. This paper illustrates these challenges and opportunities with an example of India's largest city – Mumbai. It discusses Mumbai's key drivers of risk, contributing factors to vulnerabilities and places it in the context of the 2005 flood – a disaster of a scale never experienced before. Citizen–government partnerships emanating from community-based small-scale initiatives for improving neighborhood's environment are analyzed. The paper concludes that there are enormous benefits in scaling up the participatory approaches, which result in reducing vulnerabilities and enhancing resilience of cities. Urban risk reduction will remain a daunting task if not built around these existing strengths of cities and their citizens.

Many small- and medium-sized Japanese cities are located along the coast and have become vulnerable to both coastal and mountain hazards. The vulnerability is increased by a rapidly growing aging population, low resources, and lack of capacity in the local governments. In this scenario, it is important that the community's potential should be fully utilized through proper awareness raising and capacity building. Town watching is considered as a useful tool to reduce urban risk in small- and medium-sized cities, where local students, teachers, parents, resident associations, and local government members collectively watch both good and bad (vulnerable) parts of their city. This collective watching and participatory mapping enhance the engagement of school children and communities in risk reduction activities. Town watching is considered as a process and it is important to continue the initiative for effective risk reduction at the community level.

On Wednesday October 20, 2004, Typhoon Tokage (called the “Typhoon no. 23 of 2004” in Japan), one of the deadliest storm in years, swept through most of the southern half of Japan. People were overcome by the massive waves and flash floods triggered by the typhoon's heavy rains and strong winds, which left at least 69 people dead, 20 missing, and some 342 injured, out of which 66 were serious injuries. The number of typhoon-related casualties was the highest in over a quarter of a century, and it further destroyed 50 homes, damaged 1,350 residences, and flooded 26,800 others. Typhoon Tokage was the tenth typhoon to make landfall in Japan in 2004. Storms and floods killed over 100 people in Japan that year, resulting in hundreds of millions of yen in damage, highlighting once again the importance of disaster management in both Japan and in East Asia.

In this chapter the objective is to link the causes (risks) with the need of disaster resilient entities (urban areas) in an era in which the climate is changing and natural hazards are likely to occur more frequently and more severely (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), 2007). The previous chapters defined what a resilient city is and how it can be understood, but another question may arise subsequently: how to measure a disaster resilient city? This is what this chapter is about: to develop a tool that is capable of adequately addressing the vulnerable parts of a city's functional system, and additionally, its responsive capacity to cope with a potential disaster. This tool – named Climate Disaster Resilience Index, which is only the process of measurement, or Climate Disaster Resilience Initiative (CDRI), which encompasses all aspects of this approach – shall demonstrate how different functionalities of a city can be assessed in a comprehensive single attempt. Accordingly, the CDRI is more than just a tool to measure the condition of a city at a certain point of time; it also has the wider ambition to lead communities and local governments onto a path of sustainable development that ought to increase the overall resilience level of their city to climate-related disasters. As a result, the CDRI tool shall serve as an urban planning tool depicting the sectors within an urban context that are more or less resilient.

On December 26, 2004, a strong earthquake of magnitude 9.0 on the richer scale, hit the Northwest of Sumatra island, Indonesia and caused the Indian Ocean Tsunami. The tsunami struck Aceh and North Sumatra (NAD), caused about 130,000 deaths, 500,000 left homeless, and extensive damage to life, property, and infrastructures. Sumatra is the western tip of island in the Indonesian archipelago. The population of Aceh province is estimated at 4.2 million (2000), or 3% of the Indonesian population and nearly a quarter of the population of Sumatra as a whole. One of the most heavily affected areas is Banda Aceh, which is located at the tip of Sumatra island had a population of 270,000 of which about 25% people lost their lives.