Guardian, the (UK)

A new tool developed by engineering consultancy Arup for the Rockefeller Foundation, the City Resilience Index, measures a city's resilience through a quantitative and qualitative survey recording issues of health, economy, infrastructure and ecosystems.

Fires in temperate forests are generally increasing in size and area. This is partly because of climate change. But by dousing small, regular fires, forest managers are also creating the conditions for cataclysmic events, according to scientists.

The school or hospital that ends up being most costly is the one that fails in a natural disaster. To manage disaster, we need to manage risk, write Robert Glasser, head of disaster risk reduction for the UN and Stephen O’Brien, UN Under-Secretary-General for OCHA.

The world’s failure to prepare for natural disasters will have “inconceivably bad” consequences as climate change fuels a huge increase in catastrophic droughts and floods and the humanitarian crises that follow, the UN’s head of disaster planning has warned.

As climate change risks go, rising sea levels fail to sound the same alarm bells as dramatic weather events and melting ice caps. A new breed of insurers, risk analysts and designers is aiming to help businesses and homeowners prepare for their long-term effect : flooded cities, submerged coastal areas, mass migrations.

In December 2015, the city of Chennai, India, was struck by devastating floods. In the aftermath of the disaster, local authorities sought advice from other cities whose experience of flooding – and pioneering plans to alleviate flood risk – could ensure Chennai is less badly affected the next time the rains hit with such force.

By tackling the environment we can also mitigate the impact of disasters, write Helen Clark, head of UN Development Programme and Robert Glasser, head of UNISDR in an opinion piece published in the Guardian.

In June 2009, not long after Victoria’s Black Saturday bushfires claimed 173 lives and destroyed more than 2000 houses, a group of architects came together to help those who had been affected, reports the Guardian. As part of the 'We will Rebuild' initiative, they offered free consultations and 19 customisable pro bono designs, which were environmentally sustainable and met the “higher end” of the building standards for those in bushfire prone areas...