Urban risk and planning

This study presents an image-based framework for rapid seismic assessment of unreinforced masonry façades using computer vision, photogrammetry, and semantic segmentation to automate 3D modeling and vulnerability analysis from multi-view RGB images.

This paper examines the formation of the Greater Sydney Heat Taskforce and the co-design of Greater Sydney’s inaugural Heat Smart City Plan as a case through which to interrogate broader challenges in urban climate governance.

In Australia, days are growing longer and summer is fast approaching. But a very strong El Niño could make this summer a sweltering one. New research examined how the Greater Sydney region is preparing for surging temperatures and more frequent heatwaves.

‘Green’ infrastructure can help control stormwater and prevent polluted wastewater from overflowing into rivers and streams.

This study applies an a priori scaffold of eight institutionalisation pathways and a cross-cutting coordination pathway to develop an institutionalisation-deficit framework.

Free climate-readiness audits are helping religious organizations identify ways to buttress their buildings for extreme heat, flooding, and other dangers.

This study applies a grid-based, explainable machine learning framework to Jeju Island and finds that rainfall, groundwater, and proximity to water bodies are key, regionally variable factors for flood occurrence, supporting nuanced flood risk management.

As cities continue to sink, we need to examine these changes at the local scale. Averages across a whole city can tell us how big the problem is, but knowing where the land is sinking fastest – and who lives there – is essential to deciding for response.

For this year’s International Day for Disaster Risk Reduction, UNDP describes how risk-informed housing and land-use planning is taking shape in Cuba, Jamaica and Venezuela, in a region where 81.2 per cent of the population lives in cities.

Study finds built-up areas potentially exposed to flooding in Nepal and neighbouring river catchments grew by 46% between 2016 and 2023. Rising exposure in valleys highlights the need to integrate disaster risk into land-use and infrastructure planning.

This briefing paper shows how disaster resilience can be integrated into Smart City development across theory, policy and practice. The findings indicate that technology and digital infrastructure alone are not sufficient to create resilient Smart Cities.

This study uses immersive VR simulations and machine learning to identify manual guidance by station staff as the most effective factor for reliable flood evacuation in suburban railway stations, emphasizing staff deployment and clear emergency broadcasts

When confronted by disaster, home is the first thing we fight to protect, and the first line of defence too. Resilience is innovated at the household level – through smarter design, better data and nature being put to work. 🌿

Bangkok’s extreme flooding highlights how climate change, urbanization, land subsidence and intense rainfall are increasing flood risk, underscoring the need for resilient drainage, green infrastructure and stronger early warning systems.

This study examines how cities across the Arizona urban corridor incorporate heat resilience into their networks of plans, using an integrated assessment approach. The researchers applied three complementary plan evaluation methods.

This study aims to systematically reveal the nexus among urban heat resilience, urban-scale expansion, and land-cover transformation in 70 rapidly urbanizing Chinese cities

This paper analyses London’s Cool Spaces scheme, finding a misalignment between policy intentions and real-world use, with depoliticisation and structural vulnerabilities undermining its effectiveness as a long-term urban heat resilience strategy.

This study examines household earthquake risk awareness and preparedness in Ghana’s Greater Accra Metropolitan Area, revealing high awareness but low preparedness. Education and prior tremor experience significantly predict readiness.

This report highlights extreme heat as an unequal urban disaster in India and Asia, detailing impacts on informal workers and urban poor, and calls for preventive, equity-focused responses like early warnings and participatory action plans.

This research quantitatively evaluates how historical landform modifications and urban expansion have altered rainfall–runoff behaviour and flood exposure.

The interaction of land subsidence with urbanization, reclamation and climate variability in contributing to massive flooding must also be examined, along with possible governance failures in light of increasing flood risk in Philippines.

The study examines how secondary cities and development cooperation can better respond to these challenges, It looks past visible outcomes such as informal settlements and flooding to the underlying practices, capacities and paradigms that produce them.

The Korea Institute of Civil Engineering and Building Technology (KICT) announced that it will apply its early detection technology for quasi-stationary linear rainbands and sudden localized torrential rainfall to the Urban Flood Forecasting Platform.

A hybrid neural network reproduces pushover analysis in about 70 milliseconds, opening the way to city-scale seismic risk mapping.

This study presents an AI-physics hybrid framework that couples five AI weather prediction models with Weather Research and Forecasting (WRF)-Urban Canopy Model (UCM) for high-resolution city-scale extreme wind prediction.

This publication details notable highlights from the Resilience Initiative Africa Project, which was implemented by UNDRR's Regional Office for Africa between August 2023–March 2026.

The nature‑based solutions for urban heat are specifically designed for neighborhoods and communities because the standard will provide users with tools and techniques to identify areas where nature‑based solutions can be most effectively implemented.

New analysis from Ordnance Survey has found more than eight in ten cities in Great Britain are already highly vulnerable to urban heat islands, and almost two thirds are set to reach severe heat vulnerability by the turn of the century.

This study examines nine case studies across the Mediterranean to analyse different mechanisms that contribute to institutional mainstreaming of nature-based solutions (NbS) for climate resilience in urban and peri-urban areas.

Using social media and meteorological data, this study quantifies the mismatch between physical heat exposure and public emotional responses from 2010 to 2024 in China.

Study of climate resilience governance in UK urban areas. Through a scoping review and policy analysis, it finds fragmented responsibilities, inequitable vulnerability and a lack of common resilience standards, proposing a place-based resilience benchmark

This toolkit provides a practical, step-by-step framework to support cities, urban local governments, planners, practitioners, and community stakeholders in developing and implementing Heat Action Plans (HAPs) to address the growing risks of extreme heat.

As heat, drought and extreme rainfall put growing pressure on Europe’s cities, the city of Guimaraes is using digital tools and scientific data to decide where climate action is needed most, and to measure what works.

This study applied an integrated flood risk assessment framework to evaluate climate-driven compound flood risk in Broadland, with particular emphasis on how methodological choices influence exposure, damage and spatial risk estimates.

Three cities are learning from each other about how to protect residents. These climate policies are also public health measures.

As heat overlaps with other intensifying climate events, scientists are uncovering how they compound each other – and how cities can adapt

As storms happen more often and with more intensity, considering the full life cycle of a building and its costs over time becomes increasingly important to get an accurate picture of how sustainable that building really is.

The new mayor wants to invest in coastal resilience, but he will have to decide which areas of the city to protect. New York City has more than 500 miles of coastline, no two miles of the waterfront are quite the same and are vulnerable in different ways.

Despite decades of warnings, neighborhoods in Reno and Spokane have sprawled ever closer to a hotter, drier wilderness. And in the summer, months of low humidity and hot weather prime the landscape to burn.

Contemporary transportation infrastructure is not designed for the extreme levels of heat as the frequency and severity of high temperatures increases. Those in charge must respond to increased stress on infrastructure systems, with mitigation techniques