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The frequency with which hazards turn to disasters is soaring. Besides the factor of climate variation, errors of decision making during planning are the critical factors. Hence, the purpose of this paper is to focus on exploring the relationship between land use planning, development, and disaster management.

This study takes hazardscape as the basis of a dialogue platform for land use planning and disaster management. The first portion of this study is to discuss the needed disaster management items in the planning process through thematic analysis; the second portion is to construct the relationship between disaster management and land use planning by the paired comparison method.

This study proposes the model for integrating planning and disaster management as the foundation of interdisciplinary collaboration. The phase of site choosing and assessment is the most critical point for starting the works of disaster prevention. The major works includes all‐hazard identification/hazardscape analysis and physical vulnerability: damage potential assessment.

This model is helpful to apply to land‐use decision making for evaluating the issues concerning disasters, and avoiding the increasing loss of lives and property. As the next step, attributes of people and environments and assessment techniques from different disciplines can also be included in the model, to achieve the ultimate goal of an environment.

Should disasters strike despite all relevant measures, the associated planning programs monitored and reviewed to enable necessary adjustments.

Recent earthquake-induced liquefaction events and associated losses have increased researchers’ interest into liquefaction risk reduction interventions. To the best of the authors’ knowledge, there was no scholarly literature related to an economic appraisal of these risk reduction interventions. The purpose of this paper is to investigate the issues in applying cost–benefit analysis (CBA) principles to the evaluation of technical mitigations to reduce earthquake-induced liquefaction risk.

CBA has been substantially used for risk mitigation option appraisal for a number of hazard threats. Previous literature in the form of systematic reviews, individual research and case studies, together with liquefaction risk and loss modelling literature, was used to develop a theoretical model of CBA for earthquake-induced liquefaction mitigation interventions. The model was tested using a scenario in a two-day workshop.

Because liquefaction risk reduction techniques are relatively new, there is limited damage modelling and cost data available for use within CBAs. As such end users need to make significant assumptions when linking the results of technical investigations of damage to built-asset performance and probabilistic loss modelling resulting in many potential interventions being not cost-effective for low-impact disasters. This study questions whether a probabilistic approach should really be applied to localised rapid onset events like liquefaction, arguing that a deterministic approach for localised knowledge and context would be a better base for the cost-effectiveness mitigation interventions.

This paper makes an original contribution to literature through a critical review of CBA approaches applied to disaster mitigation interventions. Further, this paper identifies challenges and limitations of applying probabilistic based CBA models to localised rapid onset disaster events where human losses are minimal and historic data is sparse; challenging researchers to develop new deterministic based approaches that use localised knowledge and context to evaluate the cost-effectiveness of mitigation interventions.

As a consequence of the huge loss and damage caused by natural disasters all over the world, an impressive amount of attention is currently being given to a holistic approach in disaster risk management (McEntire, Fuller, Johnston, & Weber, 2002). The world experiences more and more natural disaster impacts in spite of numerous efforts, advancing sciences, and more powerful technologies. Indeed, current disasters are more complex, and climate change poses a greater potential for adverse impacts (Aalst & Burton 2002). Hence, there is a need to reassess the existing disaster risk reduction approaches due to problems in the existing risk management approaches, and new risks brought by climate change and by environment degradation.

There is a tremendous growth of housing stock with subsequent resource consumption due to rapid urbanization. Most of the existing small-scale constructions have no planning, leading to both environmental degradation and negligible resilience to hazards. The contemporary sustainability and green building concepts are difficult to apply to small individual housing units but a collective regional assessment can be made. The regulatory bodies need to assess regions for resiliency and sustainability to prioritize fund allocation. Due to varying housing typologies and unaccounted resource consumption, reliable spatial information/data are not available to quantify risks and sustainability. The paper aims to discuss these issues.

The fuzzy logic approach has been used here to propose a regional assessment factor to give a coarse relative status of each region (and not individual houses). The criterion considered incorporates both hazard safety and environmental aspects.

A model of fuzzy technique for order preference by similarity to ideal solution based on experts’ linguistic opinions has been designed with appropriate negations for prioritizing regions.

This paper anticipates that apart from pressing the need for increasing resilience to hazards, this simplified opinion-based tool will assist the government and administrators to prioritize and strategize their funds/efforts toward achieving safety and sustainability. Depending on the evaluation and assessment, specific retrofits can be planned and executed. The assessment may be used by NGOs working in housing sector and architects and engineering professionals or academicians.

As South Africa (SA) increasingly becomes overwhelmed by natural disasters, understanding disaster risk reduction (DRR) policies, institutions, processes and practices and their effects on disaster risk management (DRM) are incumbent The study reviews and empirically analyses policies, institutional frameworks and processes for disaster management in SA. Content analysis is applied to review topical secondary data, while a structured questionnaire informed by the Sendai Framework for Disaster Risk Reduction is used to collect quantitative data from a random sample of 228 disaster policy actors from five disaster-stricken metropolitan cities in five provinces in SA, namely North-West, Free State, KwaZulu-Natal, Limpopo and Mpumalanga. Empirical data were analysed using the Statistical Package for the Social Sciences (SPSS) software. Research findings reveal that SA is endowed with rich institutional policy and legal frameworks for DRM, based on the concepts of decentralisation and stakeholder participation. A positive and strong correlation between institutional framework, disaster risk identification and prioritisation, knowledge creation and management (KCM) as well as the disaster governance and DRM in SA (p = 0.000). Although the coefficient of KCM is not statistically significant, DRM behaviour was influenced at 87.2% by all four variables. Based on the recent disaster experiences and the above results, we advocate for DRR to be continuously prioritised at national and decentralised levels, to enhance effective preparedness, mitigation, disaster response and resilience building practices in SA.

Resilience has become a priority of most agendas for disaster risk reduction at different scales leading to an increase demand for measurement of resilience. However, resilience is mostly defined, assessed and measured by outsider experts rather than by those primarily concerned – local people. This article presents the development of people-centred indicators of resilience in New Zealand. It details both the process and outcomes of these indicators.

The study draws from participatory methods to develop a six-step tool kit for people-centred indicators of resilience. The people-centred indicators were implemented with four communities in New Zealand in 2019 and 2020.

The paper highlights that people are capable at defining and assessing their own resilience. The indicators enabled people identify and measure areas of low resilience and foster dialogue between locals and practitioners to strengthen it.

People-centred indicators also have limitations and pose challenges. Their development requires strong facilitation skills; it limitedly enables comparison across communities and implies downward accountability.

The findings should stimulate discussions about who should measure resilience and for whom such measurement is it for. It provides a tool kit that can be used by practitioners and policy makers to measure and strengthen community resilience.

Most resilience indicators is outsider-driven and limitedly involves local people. This study uses a radically different approach placing people at the centre of resilience measurement.

Metro Manila, composed of 13 cities and 4 municipalities, is the home of more than 11 million people, and is vulnerable to different types of hazards, including earthquakes and flooding. This chapter focuses on the legal and institutional framework of Metro Manila, and analyzes the effectiveness of local governance in reducing the impacts of earthquake risk in the community level. Although most of the cities are faced with different barriers and challenges with regard to institutional and legal aspects, it is required to mobilize communities and utilize appropriate community leadership to enhance actions at the local level. In case of Manila, barangay or the lowest government body plays a key role in implementing risk reduction measures at community levels, and barangay captain (elected local representative) plays a crucial role in facilitating implementation. A combination of public help, mutual help, and self-help will be able to develop risk reduction strategies at local level.