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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.

Cities have been exposed to a variety of natural disasters such as flooding, extreme temperatures, storms, earthquakes, and other natural shocks, and have had to respond and adapt to such pressures over time. In the context of global climate change, natural disasters have increased across the globe. Apart from climate change, many urban environments in Latin America are experiencing significant transformations in land use patterns, socio-demographic change, changing labor markets, and economic growth, resulting from recent decades of globalization. Such transformations have resulted in the internal fragmentation of cities. In this context, the purpose of the present chapter is to demonstrate the importance in both theoretical and methodological terms, of integrating the concept of socio-environmental fragmentation into urban vulnerability research in order to make progress toward higher degrees of local sustainability in those areas of the city that suffer natural disasters and fragmentation.

A mixed methods approach is used in order to combine different technical issues from urban and climate change studies.

The findings are related to the importance of an integrated approach, regarding the complexity of urban life, and the relationship between the urban, the social, and the environmental phenomenon.

This chapter relates to the revisit of the current state of preparedness and to determine whether further adaptations are required. The authors understood that these kinds of mixed approaches are necessary in order to understand the new complexity of urban processes.

Urban resilience is becoming increasingly important due to increasing degree of urbanization and a combination of several factors affecting urban vulnerability. Urban resilience is also understood as a capacity of a system to prepare, respond and recover from multi-hazard threats. The purpose of multi-risk approach (MRA) is to take into consideration interdependencies between multiple risks, which can trigger a chain of natural and manmade events with different spatial and temporal scales. The purpose of this study is to understand correlation between multi-risk approach and urban resilience.

To increase urban resilience, MRA should also include multi-risk governance, which is based on understanding how existing institutional and governance structures, individual judgments and communication of risk assessment results shape decision-making processes.

This paper is based on extensive fieldwork in the test studies of Naples, Italy and Guadeloupe, France, the historical case study analysis and the stakeholders’ interviews, workshops and focus groups discussions.

Multi-risk is a relatively new field in science, only partially developed in social and geosciences. The originality of this research is in establishment of a link between MRA, including both assessment and governance, and urban resilience. In this paper, the authors take a holistic and systemic look at the MRA, including all stages of knowledge generation and decision-making. Both, knowledge generation and decision-making are reinforced by behavioural biases, different perceptions and institutional factors. Further on, the authors develop recommendations on how an MRA can contribute to urban resilience.

The purpose of this paper is to analyze two studies pertaining to the National Mall and Memorial Parks in Washington DC, to gain a better understanding of risk management perceptions and processes as applied to urban cores that consistently host tourists and special events.

The first study is a qualitative analysis of open‐ended commentary that addresses issues pertaining to safety and security to garner an overarching sense of risk management perceptions that National Mall visitors have when considering these parklands. The second study involves participant observation, quantitative documentation and analysis of specific risk management processes utilized during the 2007 National Independence Day Celebration.

The findings of the first study suggest that personal safety is viewed as paramount and that visitors are not overly worried about the threat of terrorist activity, as illustrated by the strong feelings of displeasure towards access obstructions and barricades. The results of the second study demonstrate how separate areas of event risk management, including security checkpoints, public information provision and law enforcement, merge during times of crisis.

The combined findings of the two studies suggest a level of psychological disconnect in terms of acceptance of safety measures that protect people versus those that protect facilities, even though these measures are often synchronized. The sensibility to risk management aesthetics that emerged is a valuable contribution that merits additional study.

Cities across the globe, particularly those of the less developed world, face long-term challenges associated with floods which impact negatively on the resilience of city systems and their inhabitants. In the city of Maroua, most urban management stakeholders have been unable to integrate flood resilience research into urban development issues. It is against this background that the purpose of this paper is to evaluate the governance issues constraining the deployment of flood resilience strategies implemented by residents in flood-prone zones and those used by the government via administrative authorities and institutions charged with urban development to flood-related risks in the city of Maroua, Far North Region of Cameroon.

Field surveys, participant observations, interviews, and on-the-spot appraisals were carried out with residents in flood-prone neighbourhoods and municipal authorities on the state of recurrent floods including mitigating strategies being implemented.

The results revealed that Maroua has a fragile ecological setting which has increased the vulnerability of the town to flood-related risks. This is further aggravated by the fact that municipal authorities are yet to have a thorough mastery of such recurrent flood incidences due to their limited planning horizons, rendering the urban poor disproportionately susceptible to flood-related stresses. This exposes them to unavoidable flood associated hazards such as water borne diseases (typhoid and cholera) as they are bogged down by physical and financial limitations. Besides, decision-making processes in relation to managing urban systems are not guided by good governance as efforts to enhance and integrate the local population for flood resilience are neither participatory nor inclusive, ushering the urban environment of Maroua into a frivolous path to profligacy.

For resilience to be deeply entrenched, the paper proffers for the mainstreaming of flood resilience strategies into urban development plans through multi-stakeholder involvement across different sectors and departments, as well as the setting up of a practical time table for monitoring the progress of these measures through geospatial technologies such as remote sensing and geographical information systems.

Risk management is one of the most important means of achieving sustainable development, while education is the most basic intervention required for addressing attitudes and changing community practice. Education for sustainable development is in this light a relatively passive yet extremely important intervention for ensuring long-term urban risk management, particularly if we want such risk management to be participatory and deeply engrained in community level practices. Information and communication management is the backbone of all the participatory processes involved in urban risk management. It is a cross cutting theme that touches each stage of the urban risk management process and is critical for ensuring that all the various stakeholders engaged in the activities operate in a coordinated, efficient, and effective manner. Education for sustainable development needs to identify and target such stakeholders who will, in the long run, make a sizeable difference by bringing about sustainability factors within urban field practice. Information and communication management is a means of smoothening the problems in the participatory processes, and for ensuring collectivity.

Persuading “urban communities” and “sustaining” environmental risk reduction measures among them, always remains a challenge. Disasters are generally perceived as one‐time, long return period, high impact events. Even in the disaster struck areas, as the time passes, people tend to overlook the miseries of the past and continue to create risk. This paper seeks to examine how neighborhood environmental issues bring communities together and also sustainably reduce risk in Mumbai.

This diagnostic study is based on thorough literature survey backed with field visit to capture viewpoints of communities, local officials, civic society, etc. The urbanization pattern of Mumbai is elaborated with specific focus on city governance and recognizing environmental and disaster vulnerabilities. Recent flood in Mumbai is deconstructed to delve of specific role of communities and other stakeholders. Existing participatory mechanism known as ALM is construed to reflect on its role in risk reduction followed by suggestive course of action.

ALM as “municipal agency‐neighborhood group partnership” has helped people learn caring the areas beyond own housing premises and work together for locality problems. City government boosted this community‐led effort, as it was not only reducing burden on overstressed municipal services and reducing flood risk but also helping to let down epidemics and water‐borne diseases.

This study is based on field study from only one city of India. Inputs from other cities from the developing world may further enrich the research.

It is observed that with due encouragement and support from local government, the voluntary community action towards neighborhood level issues can be well mobilized and sustained for long‐term.

People‐centered approaches transcend across developmental disciplines and significantly contribute towards reduction of environmental and hazard risk.

Disasters being common in Indian cities, communities have created and utilized their own coping mechanism to deal with such situations and strengthen their resilience by adopting methods to adjust to the risk situation. For example, during the Mumbai Floods in 2005, slum communities, with the support of social organizations, were able to adopt ways to cope well with the risk situation (Chatterjee, 2010). This chapter particularly focuses on community-based approaches in urban India.

Accra, the capital of Ghana is far away from major earthquake zones of the world, but has a history of destructive earthquakes. However, its seismic risk does not attract the requisite attention. The purpose of this paper is to give an overview of Accra's seismic risk, discuss challenges faced and risk‐reduction initiatives, and then to propose specific strategies that are necessary to reduce this risk.

The approach taken is to: give an overview of Accra's profile and seismicity; discuss disaster management structures in place and the challenges faced; discuss seismic risk‐reduction programs; discuss the risk‐reduction strategies of two cities in other developing countries, with the view of identifying specific strategies that would be helpful to Accra; and conclude with specific risk‐reduction action measures that are important for Accra.

A number of specific recommendations to reduce Accra's seismic risk are made at the end of the paper. Among these, the need to set up a national organization with the sole mandate of championing seismic risk reduction is identified as a critical step needed. Without this, and others, the paper contends that Accra would not experience any significant reduction of its seismic risk.

The paper presents a viewpoint of important action steps that need to be taken to reduce Accra's seismic risk. The points raised in the paper are considered as important first steps necessary for any form of sustainable disaster risk reduction. The paper would thus be of interest to any person or organization interested in helping reduce Accra's seismic risk.

This is the first paper to put Accra's seismic risk in a global context, and then propose action steps that are necessary to help reduce this risk.

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.