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Kuala Lumpur, the capital of Malaysia, is exposed to several natural hazards, among which flash floods are most common and frequent. Expanding development and higher intensity of rainfall are the primary causes of flash floods. As the urbanisation is growing, the number of exposed properties, people and business premises are also increasing. This may have a detrimental impact on the socio-economic state of the city. Therefore, the purpose of this chapter is to investigate the frequency and intensity of flash flood occurrences between 2011 and 2016 and to delineate how it is impacting the urban livelihood. For this study, several news reports of flash flood events, previously published and reports were reviewed to elicit information so that the frequency and intensity of flash floods can be analysed for identifying flash flood risk areas. Along with the information from newspapers, Google map was used to identify the spatial locations of flash flood events, thus identifying the risk zones. This study found the City Centre as the most risk prone to flash floods. It was noted that 39% of flash floods occurred in this place. The Damansara-Penchala area comes in the second position with 20% of flash floods occurring in this place. Most of the people of these zones are exposed to flash flood and the affected people suffer from road blocking and heavy traffic jam. This study will help researchers and policymakers to understand the impact of flash floods in the city. This will also help to identify the most flood-prone areas of the city.

This paper examines the impact of urban form on disaster resiliency. The literature shows a complex relationship between urban form factors such as density and diversity and disaster recovery. The empirical analysis in this paper tests the impact of land use mix, population density, building type and diversity on the reconstruction progress in three, six and nine months after the 2010 flood in Brisbane and Ipswich as proxies of disaster resilience. Considerable debate exists on whether urban form factors are the causal incentive or are they mediating other non-urban form causal factors such as income level. In view of this, the effects of a series of established non-urban form factors such as income and tenure, already known as effective factors on disaster resilience, are controlled in the analysis.

The structure of this paper is based on a two-phase research approach. In the first phase, for identification of hypothetical relationships between urban form and disaster resiliency, information was gathered from different sources on the basis of theory and past research findings. Then in phase two, a database was developed to test these hypothetical relationships, employing statistical techniques (including multivariate regression and correlation analysis) in which disaster recovery was compared among 76 suburbs of Brisbane and Ipswich with differing levels of population density and land use mix.

The results indicate that population density is positively related to disaster resilience, even when controlling for contextual variables such as income level and home ownership. The association between population density and disaster reconstruction is non-linear. The progress of reconstruction to population density ratio increases from low, medium to high densities, while in very low and very high density areas the reconstruction progress does not show the same behavior, which suggests that medium-high density is the most resilient.

The originality of this paper is in extracting hypothetical relationships between urban form and resiliency and testing them with real world data. The results confirmed the contribution of density to recovery process in this case study. This illustrates the importance of attention to disaster resiliency measures from the early stages of design and planning in development of resilient urban communities.

It might seem plausible to argue that effective monitoring of disaster data loss can help achieve progress in reporting to the Sendai Framework for Disaster Risk Reduction (SFDRR) and the global targets of sustainable development goals and associated indicators. Nevertheless, with the lack of climate change and disaster data losses in the Arab region, the integration of risks associated with socio-economic dimensions at the wider scale of displacement is important to shape a regional understanding of resilience terminology and provides the means of translating it. The purpose of this paper is to identify the means of redefining “Resilience” in the Arab region context of climate change, conflict and displacement in association with the theoretical principles of the “fragile city”.

In an attempt to achieve the SFDRR target (E) “substantially increase the number of countries with national and local DRR strategies by 2020,” this study investigates the use of the (United Nations Office for Disaster Risk Reduction) disaster resilience scorecard as a guiding principle for city-to-city (C2C) resilience-building knowledge exchange between Amman (Jordan) and Khartoum (Sudan).

Facing similar urban challenges against disaster and violent conflict-protracted displacement, the study findings indicate that the C2C exchange program was useful in understanding the cities’ urban risk profiles, promoting dialogue among local governments and creating a culture of learning organizations for knowledge sharing on DRR governance and beyond. However, the applied resilience assessments overlooked the qualitative and socio-ecological understanding of climate change risk and human security principles among the most vulnerable groups of refugees and internally displaced persons in fragile settings. This is recommended to be integrated into building coherence for resilience across the 2015-2030 Global Agendas reporting and monitoring mechanisms, leaving “no one behind”.

The C2C exchange program for Amman and Khartoum was an opportunity for understanding the cities’ urban risk profiles, addressing challenges and building “decentralized cooperation” beyond the cities’ institutional boundaries (UN Habitat, 2001), with recommendations for “selecting resilience indicators specific to fragile cities” to quantitatively measure disaster displaced persons’ (DDPs) vulnerabilities and current status of “income and social equality, microeconomic security, provision of basic services and social protection” while providing qualitative evidence on “social cohesion, social networks/social support and local government–community cooperation” (Patel and Nosal, 2016).

Urban communities can be faced with many destructive events that can disrupt the daily functioning of activities and livelihood of people living in the communities. In this regard, during the last couple of years, many governments have put a lot of efforts into building resilient urban communities. Essentially, a resilient urban community has the capacity to anticipate future disasters, prepare for and recover timely from adverse effects of disasters and unexpected circumstances. Considering this, it is therefore important for the need to continuously review the existing urban community resilience indicators, in order to identify emerging ones to enable comprehensive evaluation of urban communities in the future against unexpected events. This study therefore aims to conduct a systematic review to develop and critically analyse the emerging and leading urban community resilience indicators.

Following the Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic Reviews and Meta-Analyses (PRSIMA) protocol, 53 journal articles were selected using Scopus. The selected papers were subjected to thorough content analysis.

From the review, 45 urban community resilience indicators were identified. These indicators were grouped into eight broad categories namely, Socio-demographic, Economic, Institutional Resilience, Infrastructure and Housing Resilience, Collaboration, Community Capital, Risk Data Accumulation and Geographical and Spatial characteristics of community. Further, the results indicated that the U.S had the highest number of publications, followed by Australia, China, New Zealand and Taiwan. In fact, very few studies emanated from developing economies.

The outputs of this study will inform policymakers, practitioners and researchers on the new and emerging indicators that should be considered when evaluating the resilience level of urban communities. The findings will also serve as a theoretical foundation for further detailed empirical investigation.

Over the last 30 years, despite immense and increasing expenditures by the federal government for disaster preparedness and relief, both catastrophic and chronic losses from natural hazards have continued to increase at an alarming pace. Although earthquakes, floods, tornadoes, and hurricanes account for the largest portion of these natural hazard losses, wildfire increasingly represents significant disaster losses of well over a billion dollars annually. There is considerable concern that losses from wildfires will only increase in the U.S. as some of the highest growth rates in the nation, both metropolitan and nonmetropolitan types of growth, are projected to continue in states with extensive wildland fire hazard areas. The land development patterns associated with that growth are problematic because so much of the development in the last 30 years (and that is still occurring) is not being steered away from the highest wildfire hazard settings, nor are adequate steps being taken to ensure that when development occurs in high wildfire hazard zones appropriate mitigation is used to reduce the vulnerability of people and property to loss. Fortunately, those anticipated future wildfire losses have a great potential to be reduced provided state and local governments take the initiative to create partnerships to ensure “safer” and “smarter” patterns of land development occur in and near wildland–urban interface areas. This chapter explores wildfire mitigation planning as an integral component of “safe smart growth” for wildland–urban interface communities.

The fact that the world is becoming increasingly urbanized is recognized by the United Nations (UNFPA, 2007) in the State of the World Population Report as the “The Urban Millennium.” In year 1950, 30% of the world's population lived in cities and as of recently, the population has reached up to 50%, making year 2007 a turning point in the history of urban population growth (Bigio, 2003; Kreimer, Arnold, & Caitlin, 2003; UN-HABITAT, 2007). By year 2030, the United Nations expects more than 60% of population to be living in cities (Munich Re, 2005). And as shown by Surjan and Shaw (2009), by year 2050, the world's urban population is expected to grow by 3 billion people. Most of this growth will take place in developing countries, with the urban population in cities and towns doubling. As it has been summarized, from 1991 to 2005, more than 3.5 billion people were affected by disasters; more than 950,000 people have taken their lives unwillingly and damages have reached nearly 1,193 billion US dollars. Developing countries will suffer the most from climate change, since they are disproportionally affected and have intrinsic vulnerabilities to hazards and so far have struggled in increasing the capacity for risk reduction measures (Wahlström, 2009). Nevertheless, by contrast, even in the largest and wealthiest countries, which have diversified economies and risk transfer mechanisms, the loss has topped an amount of billions of US dollars, as was the case with Hurricane Katrina in USA in 2005. It has been confirmed with facts over the last two decades (1988–2007) that 76% of all disaster events were hydrological, meteorological, or climatological in nature, whether it occurred in urban or in rural areas.

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.

Risk assessments are the very basis on which planning and implementation are carried out. In the context of urban risk management, the assessment processes are complex to understand as they involve multi-sectoral parameters. Many of the issues involved are of technical nature, but this also requires focus on the principles behind the assessment process including participatory assessment tools.

Action planning is a participatory, short-term, visible, output-oriented process that enables urban community groups to plan the development of risk reduction actions in their locality and to lead the implementation of the action plans.

There are three kinds of actions that emerge from an action planning process: (i) those that can be implemented by the community groups themselves, (ii) those that need some external help for implementation, and (iii) those that can only be implemented by specialized agencies from outside the community. Implementation management processes thus need to look at how internal systems can be established to operationalize self-action, and to coordinate external interventions.

Cities are both at risk and the cause of risk. The interconnectedness of urban features and systems increases the likelihood of complex disasters and a cascade or “domino” effect from related impacts. However, the lack of research means that our knowledge of urban risk is both scarce and fragmented. Against this background, the purpose of this paper is to examine the unique dynamics of risk in urban settings.

Based on literal reading, grounded theory and systems analysis, this conceptual paper presents a framework for understanding and addressing urban risk. It conceptualizes how interdependent, interconnected risk is shaped by urban characteristics and exemplifies its particularities with data and analysis of specific cases. From this, it identifies improvements both in the content and the indicators of the successor to the Hyogo Framework for Action (HFA2) that will be adopted in 2015.

While it is common to see disasters as “causes”, and the destruction of the built environment as “effects”, this paper highlights that the intricate links between cities and disasters cannot be described by a unidirectional cause-and-effect relationship. The city–disasters nexus is a bidirectional relationship, which constantly shapes, and is shaped by, other processes (such as climate change).

This paper argues that in-depth knowledge of the links between cities’ characteristic features, related systems and disasters is indispensable for addressing root causes and mainstreaming risk reduction into urban sector work. It enables city authorities and other urban actors to improve and adapt their work without negatively influencing the interconnectedness of urban risk.

This paper presents a framework for understanding and addressing urban risk and further demonstrates how the characteristics of the urban fabric (physical/spatial, environmental, social, economic and political/institutional) and related systems increase risk by: intensifying hazards or creating new ones, exacerbating vulnerabilities and negatively affecting existing response and recovery mechanisms.