Tomorrow's Cities

Tomorrow’s Cities

Project Title: GCRF Urban Disaster Risk Hub

Start Date: 01/02/2019

End Date: 31/10/2024

Project summary:

The Hub will reduce disaster risk for the poor in tomorrow’s cities. The failure to integrate disaster risk resilience into urban planning and decision-making is a persistent intractable challenge that condemns hundreds of millions of the World’s poor to continued cyclical destruction of their lives and livelihoods. It presents a major barrier to the delivery of the Sustainable Development Goals in expanding urban systems. Science and technology can help, but only against complex multi-hazard context of urban life and the social and cultural background to decision-making in developing countries. Science-informed urbanisation, co-produced and properly integrated with decision support for city authorities, offers the possibility of risk-sensitive development for millions of the global poor. This is a major opportunity – some 60% of the area expected to be urban by 2030 is yet to be built. Our aim is to catalyse a transition from crisis management to risk-informed planning in four partner cities and globally through collaborating International governance organisations.

Objectives:

The Hub will reduce disaster risk for the poor in tomorrow’s cities. It will catalyse a step change in the relationship between science, decision-making and planning for pro-poor, risk-sensitive development in expanding urban systems worldwide and has been built entirely in response to this GCRF call. It has been co-produced with trusted city teams to provide research support for identified, existing policy implementation initiatives: Istanbul [the Istanbul Urban Transformation Master Plan]; Kathmandu [the National Strategy for Resilient Urban communities]; Nairobi [the Nairobi City Disaster Management Plan and Mukuru Special Planning Area]; Quito [the Risk Management Directorate and Quito Resilience Strategy]. The Hub is precisely tailored to the needs of our partners and their cities. Guided by the Hub Theory of Change and Pathways to Impact, interdisciplinary and coproduced research delivered through partnerships and aligned capacity building programmes will deliver evidence and experience based outputs including high resolution, multi-hazard risk assessment, associated governance frameworks and management decision-making capacity. This theory of change will enable cities to meet their SDG and Sendai Framework commitments. Through partners involved in global SDG and SF processes the Hub also aims to influence global policy.

COMET investigators: