Increasing disaster resilience in urban settings: Multi-hazard risk assessment in urban environment

The effective capacity of building resilience in large cities depends on a thorough knowledge of their exposure to risks. Almost each urban area, especially extended and highly populated cities, is exposed to a number of different risks, which can span from urban fires, to floods, tsunamis in coastal areas, earthquakes, etc. The whole set of risks should be thus taken into consideration in the urban planning process bearing in mind that risks are not separated but strictly interconnected: different threats can interfere among them and result in the so–called 'cascade/domino effect' creating further challenges for the emergency systems.

This is the reason why PPRD South decided to organise the two workshops back to back: starting from the broad concept of "resilience" in urban areas, the first part of this event will introduce tools to build urban resilience for intended subsequent implementation at the municipality level; the second part will focus on, multi risk assessment including a EU sponsored experimental methodology which will be presented and experienced by the participants, through practical application to a reference scenario.

Therefore, the overall workshops sequence can be summarised as follows:

15th – 16th October :11th PPRD South 'prevention and preparedness' workshop for staff-level officials 'Increasing disaster resilience in urban settings'

17th; 19th October: 12th PPRD South 'prevention and preparedness' workshop for staff-level officials 'Multi-hazard risk assessment in urban environment'

18th October: practical exercise on multi hazard risk assessment and 'Post-event urban reconstruction tour in Lisbon' (a 'study visit' related to how disaster urban resilience is dealt with at the local level and case-studies on community's efforts to re-build the city in the aftermath of the 1755 Great Lisbon Earthquake and Tsunami).