Reducing disaster risk for the poor in tomorrow’s cities with computational science

This article agues that computational science can help urban planners and decision-makers to turn the challenges associated with rapid urban expansion into a time-limited opportunity to reduce disaster risk for hundreds of millions of people.

Rapid urban expansion presents a major challenge to delivering the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals. Urban populations are forecast to increase by 2.2 billion by 2050, and business as usual will condemn many of these new citizens to lives dominated by disaster risk. This need not be the case.