The session showcased the Tomorrow’s Cities Decision Support Environment and learnings from its deployment in Nepal addressing challenges in supporting people-centred, evidence-based decision making for low-risk urban futures.
How can we incorporate the priorities of the most vulnerable in our quantifications of future multi-hazard risk? How can these democratised quantifications support evidence-based decisions for low-risk urban futures amidst a backdrop of amplifying climate change and unprecedented urbanisation?
The UK Tomorrow’s Cities Urban Disaster Risk Hub is actively tackling these challenges across several cities in low- and middle-income countries. The state-of-the-art Tomorrow’s Cities Decision Support Environment (TCDSE) is key to this effort. The TCDSE combines hi-fidelity physics-based modelling of natural hazards and their impacts on interacting physical infrastructure and social systems with participatory stakeholder engagement to provide iterative, interdisciplinary decision support for disaster-risk-informed urban planning and design. A central innovation of the TCDSE is the concept of an “agreed risk” measurement that accounts for both the physical/social impacts of multiple future hazards on urban spaces and the relative importance of different impact metrics to engaged stakeholders in ground-breaking democratisation of risk. The “Risk Agreement” module of the TCDSE forms the central theme of the proposed session.
“There is an opportunity within this massive global challenge: 60% of the urban development that will exist by 2050 has not been built yet. This is a one-off limited time chance for us to try and protect future generations. A century of lives can be changed by the actions that we take over the next decade.”
“To guarantee the continuity of programs in Latin America, it is essential to build an institutional front within global agencies like the World Bank, UNDRR, and UCLG. We can have a strong program which is helping not to fossilize what we do in tomorrow’s cities but to build a community of practice.”
“Up to 2 billion people will move to urban centers globally by 2050, and 95% of these people will expand cities in the global south. 70% of the global population will live in cities, which means that nearly a billion people will be exposed to major damaging earthquakes and climate change will worsen many of the existing growing hazards of flowing, storms, landslides, etc. The poor and marginalized will bear the burden of these disasters.”
