Academic Publications

Istanbul is a major global urban centre. With city expansion expected to continue over the next few decades there is a real opportunity for urban growth that incorporates disaster risk reduction (DRR). But in order to develop DRR inclusive urban development strategies we need to understand the breadth of hazards that can affect the city and their potential interactions.

To create a single hazard overview for the city we searched through peer-reviewed literature, reports, government websites and international disaster databases for hazard occurrences. Of the 34 natural hazards in our global hazard table encompassing five major hazard groups (geophysical, shallow process, meteorological, hydrological, climatological and extraterrestrial), we found 27 of these had occurred or had the potential to occur in Istanbul. Notable absences were snow avalanches, glacial outburst floods and direct volcanic hazards. However, ash dispersal models show that ash from volcanic eruptions in the Mediterranean can affect the city.

Additionally, we present an interaction matrix for hazards relevant to the city that shows how one hazard may trigger or increase the probability of another. We adapted the global hazard interaction matrix of Gill and Malamud (2014) by removing hazards that were not relevant to Istanbul and supplementing it with specific examples that have occurred in the city. We found 85 such interactions that reveal the potential for interacting chains of natural hazards.

We discuss how multi-hazard scenarios, developed through expert stakeholder engagement and based on the hazard interaction matrix, are an effective way to explore and communicate the dynamic variability of exposure, vulnerability and therefore, multi-hazard risk.

The Sendai Framework for DRR 2015–2030 identifies an urgent need for a global effort by researchers, practitioners, and governments to integrate science with action to support risk-sensitive decision making . Tomorrow’s Cities aims to co-produce methodologies and guidelines for this action-oriented, pro-poor, multi-hazard risk-based decision-making agenda.

Understanding and acting on risk is complex. Risk assessments are necessarily based on significant simplifications of the underlying physical and social processes, they are difficult to validate, and the reporting process often obscures caveats implicit in underlying assumptions. Technical outputs may have an inappropriate impact due to inaccurate expectations and limited comprehension).

Experience also shows that state-of-the-art risk modelling on its own is not sufficient to build risk reduction into development planning and to support a movement to pro-poor, resilient actions. Institutional inertia, exclusive decision-making structures, and competing interests can mean even the best new knowledge is used only to enhance existing policy and practice.

This means that risk science has to be built on the best current methods and must also understand the development context within which risk and resilience are positioned by competing actors in a city. It must then be used to convene policy and practical spaces for new coalitions of interest to cohere and bring pro-poor resilience into policy and action.

This editorial outlines Tomorrow’s Cities new approach to risk.

In Quito, UKRI GCRF funding has allowed the Tomorrow’s Cities Hub to work in partnership with government, universities, civil society and communities since late 2019. This interdisciplinary team is actively working to secure disaster risk management and livelihood opportunities for the most vulnerable populations caught up in the rapid urban growing. This five year investment by UKRI was designed to secure lasting change, yet it is now under severe jeopardy due to cuts to the UK’s ODA budget. This statement is Tomorrow’s Quito’s response to the cuts.

In Kathmandu, UKRI GCRF funding is enabling the Tomorrow’s Cities Hub to work in partnership with government, research institutes, civil society and communities. This interdisciplinary team is actively working to secure disaster risk management and livelihood opportunities for the most vulnerable populations caught up in rapid urban development. This five-year investment by UKRI is designed to secure lasting change, yet is under threat due to cuts to the UK’s ODA budget.

In this paper, we discuss the dynamic nature of risk through the lens of multi-hazard relationships and scenarios. Disaster risk is commonly expressed as (Risk = Hazard × Exposure × Vulnerability). This expression does not communicate the extent to which each term (and therefore risk and impact) can change over time, and any relationships between the four variables. To better convey and discuss multi-hazards and dynamic risk, in July and August 2020 we held two virtual workshops (40 and 35 participants) as part of the GCRF Tomorrow’s Cities Research Hub, which has as its focus four cities Istanbul, Kathmandu, Nairobi, and Quito, with a particular emphasis on the urban poor. During the two workshops, participants (including those from academia, NGOs, and the public sector) from each city generated multi-hazard scenarios that can be used to improve the understanding of dynamic risk and we highlighted three main examples of dynamic risk: (1) The hazard term can involve multiple hazards, with relationships between hazards, and the likelihood or magnitude of single natural hazards and multi-hazard scenarios varying over time. (2) Both the exposure and vulnerability components of the risk equation change over time, and can contribute to the triggering, amplification (or reduction) of multi-hazard events. (3) Progression through multi-hazard scenarios can influence or drive changes in both exposure and/or vulnerability terms. These three statements illustrate the dynamic nature of each component of the risk equation and the existence of relationships between each term. Furthermore, they demonstrate how understanding the multi-hazard landscape and potential multi-hazard scenarios can help to enrich understanding of dynamic risk. This understanding of multi-hazard scenarios can be used to consider potential interventions where risk is dynamic.

In Nairobi, Tomorrow’s Cities Hub is working in partnership with the government and communities to build disaster risk out of urban development. The research will be of direct benefit to 1 million informal settlement dwellers in Mukuru and Kibera. Internationally the lives and livelihoods of 2 billion people who live in cities of low-to-middle income countries are threatened by floods, earthquakes, landslides, volcanoes, and fires. This number is expected to reach 4 billion by 2050. Such impactful research is only possible because of the considerable commitment made by Nairobi City County and by community-based organisations such as the Kounkuey Design Initiative brought together by the research of the Tomorrow’s Cities Hub.

ODA cuts to already programmed research will directly harm the life chances of the most vulnerable today and could potentially erode partnership gains with the UK already achieved over the last few years.

Global policy frameworks, such as the Sendai Framework for Disaster Risk Reduction 2015-2030, increasingly advocate for multi-hazard approaches across different spatial scales. However, management approaches on the ground are still informed by siloed approaches based on one single natural hazard (e.g. flood, earthquake, snowstorm). However, locations are rarely subjected to a single natural hazard but rather prone to more than one. These different hazards and their interactions (e.g. one natural hazard triggering or increasing the probability of one or more natural hazards), together with exposure and vulnerability, shape the disaster landscape of a given region and associated disaster impact.  Here, as part of the UK GCRF funded research grant “Tomorrow’s Cities” we first map out the single natural hazardscape for Nairobi using evidence collected through peer-reviewed literature, grey literature, social media and newspapers. We find the following hazard groups and hazard types present in Nairobi: (i) geophysical (earthquakes, volcanic eruptions, landslides), (ii) hydrological (floods and droughts), (iii) shallow earth processes (regional subsidence, ground collapse, soil subsidence, ground heave), (iv) atmospheric hazards (storm, hail, lightning, extreme heat, extreme cold), (v) biophysical (urban fires), and vi) space hazards (geomatic storms, and impact events). The breadth of single natural hazards that can potentially impact Nairobi is much larger than normally considered by individual hazard managers that work in Nairobi. We then use a global hazard matrix to identify possible hazard interactions, focusing on the following interaction mechanisms: (i) hazard triggering secondary hazard, (ii) hazards amplifying the possibility of the secondary hazard occurring.  We identify 67 possible interactions, as well as some of the interaction cascade typologies that are typical for Nairobi (e.g. a storm triggers and increases the probability of a flood which in turn increases the probability of a flood). Our results indicate a breadth of natural hazards and their interactions in Nairobi, and emphasise a need for a multi-hazard approach to disaster risk reduction.

Disasters do not discriminate; however, existing socio-economic conditions present segregated disaster impacts even for similar communities- demographically. Here, the most vulnerable groups within these communities suffer most. Research shows that disasters increase gender inequalities. This framework analysis sought to bring to the construct of disaster risk reduction, gender intersectionality perspectives, and ways of gender mainstreaming in disasters in Kenya.  It is undeniable that each time a disaster occurs, gender relations are part of the human experiences that arise from disasters. Therefore, the inclusion and advancement of gender mainstreaming or responsiveness into disaster risk reduction are timely, especially when the world is faced with numerous disasters inclusive of emerging ones as COVID19. The findings resulting from this study used a Participatory Action Approach. Primary data presented a multi-level approach to disaster risk reduction comprising of local, city-level and international participation. The results show a need for gender mainstreaming in disaster risk reduction in Kenya. These efforts call for training, community leadership network and a rethink on policies for research and practice to address the local people’ sufferings in the face of disasters, and lost livelihoods.

This Research Data Management Plan is designed to enable a comprehensive and co-created approach to Research Data Management with UK/DAC partners and researchers which will align and enhance Tomorrow’s Cities (TC) mission and impact.

Data management goals

Tomorrow’s Cities has three principal goals for research data management:

• to support each city in developing its own open data infrastructure, following the roadmap in “Open Data Infrastructure for City Resilience” (UNISDR 2018);
• to create a data hub outside the Hub, both to support continuity and disaster recovery and to provide a common research environment for the Hub;
• to facilitate data sharing and research pooling across the consortium, but particularly “south-south partnerships”.

Data use in Tomorrow’s Cities

The Hub will create, collect and collate data of multiple types from multiple sources centred in the four global cities, for a number of research purposes:

• detailed local mapping of hazards and vulnerability, incorporating local knowledge;
• real-time monitoring of hazards, their impacts and people’s responses;
• initialisation of predictions and models (both manual and computer-based);
• verification and improvement of predictions and model (to build trust in their accuracy);
• characterisation of multi-hazard events;
• assessing and improving risk management systems (hazard, impact, response);
• reassessment and reuse of the research.

Managing disaster risk is about a good deal more than disaster risk management. Risk and loss arise from the accumulated legacy of decision-making and decision-making contexts that enmesh the environmental, technological and human to go far beyond the purview of risk managers, humanitarian agencies and first responders. How then to orient disasters research to better open development processes and attendant governance as central components for risk reduction? The whole of culture approach offers one response to this challenge. Influence over disaster risk and loss outcomes is shaped by the intersection of individual decision-making processes with informal and formal norms, organisational structures and tools. Human behaviour as part of development does not have a linear association with policy, norms or capacity but brings multiple, often hidden and open-ended, interactions between identity, behaviour, framing systems of legislation and social norms cross-cut by knowledge.

Knowledge is always contested and contextual. Science methodologies attempt to make their social framing and underlying assumptions transparent, but are not always successful in communicating these. Once in the public domain even the most transparent and careful science products become part of a knowledge ecosystem including local knowledge, personal experience, social media and the vested communications of government, civil society and private sector interests (Nalau et al 2018). We argue that amongst this complexity, knowledge production, control, interpretation and use offers a key to understanding action within development that influences risk. This view holds for individuals at risk and also for planners, investors, managers and politicians holding influential decision-making positions. The perspective offered derives from contemporary work on social theory including assemblage theory and science and technology studies and from methodological experience, especially in coproduction, interdisciplinarity and action research.

The whole of culture approach is proposed not only because of recent innovations but also in response to a renewed sense of urgency around the need for joined up action on the root causes of risk. Risk root causes are embedded in ongoing and everyday development vision and actions, yet risk management finds it difficult to be a central concern for development actors. This is a longstanding challenge. In 1983, James Hewitt observed that disaster risk management was an archipelago to development – connected but at the same time held at distance, informing but marginal to development vision and outcomes. This characterisation of a disaster risk science and management toolkit somehow removed from the levers of decision-making continues today. Lewis and Kelman (2007) capture the current concern by calling for an extension in the focus of risk reduction to confront also risk creation – the knowing or accidental creation of vulnerability and hazard exposure through development decisions from the household to the international. This concern is heightened as processes of globalisation and interdependent infrastructure systems (including those of the informal sector) mean that risk and loss can cascade across places with impacts moving across sectors (UNDRR 2013). Already heightened by the observed effects of climate change as an impact multiplier on development failure, the COVID-19 pandemic has accelerated this concern. The impacts of COVID-19 and management responses have demonstrated how many of the root causes of vulnerability to natural hazards (overcrowded dwellings, inadequate access to clean water, limited primary health care, educational inequality, social marginalisation, exposure to violence, distrust of official agencies) are made worse by the predominant economic and social structures at the heart of development. These inequalities have long been recorded, the association with disaster risk long known, but development practice has been consistently ineffective in taking action.

The paper first accounts for the ways in which culture has been brought into risk and disaster studies and then describes the long-standing desire from researchers and practitioners to better understand and act on risk creation as a development, not a risk management concern. The whole of culture approach is built from innovation across assemblage thinking, science and technology studies, interdisciplinarity and coproduction which are presented and then summarised before being applied to an urban research programme to test the relevance of the approach.

Each of the four focus cities within the Tomorrow’s Cities Hub is affected by multiple, potentially interrelated, natural hazards. Known case studies also highlight contexts where events may occur simultaneously or consecutively, thus contributing to disaster risk through changes to the hazard landscape, exposure, or vulnerability, during the scenario.

This report summarises the contents and discussions of two 60-minute virtual workshops (30 July 2020, 40 participants; 6 August 2020, 35 participants) delivered by the multi-hazards integrating theme for the Tomorrow’s Cities consortium. Our aims in the workshops were the following:

• To introduce the multi-hazards integrating theme; and
• To explore the relevance of multi-hazard approaches and scenarios in the Tomorrow’s Cities project.

Equitable partnerships are central to the GCRF portfolio overall, the interdisciplinary hubs, and specifically to the Tomorrow’s Cities Hub. Achieving the Hub’s aim of catalysing a transition from crisis management to multi-hazard risk-informed and inclusive planning for cities in low-and-middle income countries, is not possible without working through equitable partnerships with a diverse set of actors. Simply delivering the results of multi-hazard risk research is not sufficient to tackle the interactable challenge of risk governance. It requires working directly with decision makers, planners, civil society and communities within cities and beyond, and doing so in a way that builds ownership of the process as much as the outcomes of the research, so that the research can directly inform decision making and city planning processes.

While the term is now gaining popularity in research circles, the idea of equitable and effective partnerships has long been part of development discourse. What equitable partnership means in practice, however, is difficult to determine as there are manifold and contested meanings of “partnership” and “equity.” A clear definition or even principles remain hard to pinpoint.

Despite there being no commonly agreed criteria of what makes a partnership equitable, the review identified common features across discussions of effective (equitable) partnerships that we argue should inform how the Hub builds, maintains and evaluates partnerships, including:

• Acknowledge principles of equality, mutuality, reciprocity, and respect. This incorporates recognising and ensuring a mutual understanding of differences between the partners and how these differences can influence the partnership. This includes differences based on cultural and contextual backgrounds, including varying capacities, priorities, timeframes, organisational incentive structures and other practices.
• Acknowledge and make power differences explicit, including that funding flows affect relationships and create power asymmetries. Funding and benefits that people get from the research need to be made explicit and equity in decision making can help address power differences. Power also influences which types of evidence and knowledge are valued and consequently how research is designed and implemented and the type of outputs that are produced for which audiences. Equitable partnerships challenge hierarchies of evidence and knowledge and are inclusive of local and Indigenous knowledges.
• At their core, partnerships are built on interpersonal relationships that are based on mutual trust. Transparency and accountability are important aspects of building this. Open communication between all partners throughout the partnership lifetime is key. Trust is one of the fundamentals of well-functioning partnerships and takes time to establish through regular, open communication.
• Engage with the context that shapes the partnership and create space for mutual learning so that the partnership can adapt to the changes in the external context. This requires bringing partners into how success if valued and evaluated and enabling learning across all to inform adaptation.  This includes the global funding context within which partnerships are formed.

There is a dearth of evidence of how working in equitable partnerships support development impact and a lack of specific assessments of implementation and contextual differences of equitable partnerships. This highlights a unique opportunity for Tomorrow’s Cities to contribute to the emergent research topic of evaluating equitable partnerships in large-scale research for development programmes. As we note in the review, existing definitions are mainly based on ideas and research by researchers from the Global North, which adds an opportunity for the Hub to shift this trend and build equitable partnerships through leadership of colleagues in LMIC of operation. Starting points for what to focus evaluation on are to consider how the partnership is performing on the design, systemic and relational dimensions, in terms of recognition, procedure and distribution. Going beyond the “usual suspects” and opening up opportunities for those other than existing national and institutional partnerships is also seen as a potential key factor in measuring the equity of a partnership.

The third DRR and gender mainstreaming dialogue with community leaders was hosted by the Nairobi Risk Hub on Wednesday the 3rd of February, 2021 on zoom platform. The community leaders were drawn from community-based organizations located in Kibera, Mathare, and Mukuru informal settlements.

The dialogues began with the researchers introducing the Multi-hazard project to the participants and walking them through interpretations of risks, hazards and disasters. After the introductory interactions, the researchers guided the rest of the conversation to cover the objectives of the dialogues. The discussions sought to understand disasters as perceived by the residents of the informal settlements, response, gender mainstreaming in CBOs and gaps that exacerbate vulnerability of the communities. Further, the representatives present made recommendations for that will enhance disaster risk reduction in the informal settlements.

The inhabitants of Latacunga living in the surrounding of the Cotopaxi volcano (Ecuador) are exposed to several hazards and related disasters. After the last 2015 volcanic eruption, it became evident once again how important it is for the exposed population to understand their own social, physical, and systemic vulnerability. Effective risk communication is essential before the occurrence of a volcanic crisis. This study integrates quantitative risk and semi-quantitative social risk perceptions, aiming for risk-informed communities. We present the use of the RIESGOS demonstrator for interactive exploration and visualisation of risk scenarios. The development of this demonstrator through an iterative process with the local experts and potential end-users increases both the quality of the technical tool as well as its practical applicability. Moreover, the community risk perception in a focused area was investigated through online and field surveys. Geo-located interviews are used to map the social perception of volcanic risk factors. Scenario-based outcomes from quantitative risk assessment obtained by the RIESGOS demonstrator are compared with the semi-quantitative risk perceptions. We have found that further efforts ar

The choice of scenario hazard events is a great challenge for many hazards and risk problems. In Tomorrow’s Cities, scenarios will be a critical part of our approach to exposing and understanding risk so it is an important area for us to consider.

Whereas extensive hazards like floods and small landslides happen frequently so the selection of scenarios is better informed by well recorded data, large earthquakes typically have nominal return periods of hundreds or even thousands of years. The selection of useful scenario earthquakes are critically important in Tomorrow’s Cities but poses a persistently difficult challenge for applied earthquake science.

John McCloskey, the Hub PI, is an earthquake scientist who has worked on the problem of earthquake recurrence for much of his career. The triggering of large earthquakes by tiny stress changes, the complexity of observed earthquake ruptures and the profound differences between successive earthquakes on the same fault, all indicate a strongly nonlinear process. Here, John argues that this nonlinearity means that even the most carefully selected scenario earthquakes is extremely unlikely to resemble the next damaging earthquake that will be experienced in any target area. The implications of this are amplified when cascading hazards complicate the impact pathway.

Here he provides a perspective on the choice of appropriate scenarios and how these challenges constrain the use to which scenarios might be put in the Hub. He concludes that illustrative scenario events, even though they will never happen, can facilitate a co-productive, multi-disciplinary process in which scientists can help expose the consequences of today’s decisions on tomorrow’s risk. This process provides a more nuanced, but not less important, role for earthquake scientists in supporting planning decisions.

The Mw 6.9 earthquake that took place offshore between the Greek island of Samos and Turkey’s İzmir province on 30 October 2020 didn’t come as a surprise (Figure 1 by F.S. Malcioğlu, BÜ, Animation 1 by Dr. M. Çağlar, BÜ). Due to the extensional tectonic regime of the Aegean and high deformation rates, earthquakes of similar size frequently occur in the Aegean Sea on fault segments close to the shores of Turkey, affecting the settlements on mainland Turkey and on the Greek Islands. However, the Samos-Sığacık earthquake was an outstanding and important event for several reasons, as this article demonstrates.