Disaster Resilience and Human Settlements

This chapter provides an overview of the book’s theme, ‘Disaster Resilience and Human Settlements: Emerging Perspectives in the Anthropocene’. First, the chapter sets the context starting from the emerging perspectives on disaster resilience and human settlements in the larger context of the proposed new geological era of Anthropocene. It explores the impact of disasters on the human settlements, giving examples and illustrating the theoretical reference framework regarding the birth of the idea of the Anthropocene. Second, the chapter focuses on the interdisciplinary nature of the ‘disaster resilience and human settlements’ theme in relation to the various global development agendas, including the Expanded Brown Agenda, the Hyogo Framework of Action, the Sendai Framework for Disaster Risk Reduction, the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development, the Sustainable Development Goals, the Paris Agreement, and the New Urban Agenda. In doing so, it dwells in particular on the theme of social vulnerability as an element capable of transforming an extreme natural event into disaster. From the various international agendas, it emerges, that the current and emerging perspectives on disaster resilience via-a-vis must be studied and addressed through a holistic and integrated approach. Such an approach ought to involve natural and social scientists, humanists, planners, policymakers, and professionals in the global debate. Finally, the chapter introduces the structure of the book including its various parts and the outlines of the papers presented therein.

Disasters triggered by natural hazards pose an increasing threat globally, thus, preparing an effective emergency response is crucial and should include simulation exercises with all the stakeholders involved. Evaluation of such exercises is especially important to collect and capitalize performance feedbacks from a plurality of point of view. The objective of this work is to evaluate the flood field exercises held at urban scale in five Emilia-Romagna, Marche, and Abruzzo municipalities. Specifically, is proposed the application of an existing three-dimensional method to analyze the management (structures), the networks (relations), and the proactivity (sensemaking) of the organizations, necessary to deal with both planned and unplanned situations. Nine face-to-face interviews, with both the organizers and the attendants of the exercises, were carried out and qualitatively analyzed. Results showed overall positive reactions to the events, the response of the participants, the relations built, and the proactivity toward the unexpected scenarios. Nonetheless, the need for flood codified alarms, strengthened procedures, back-up communication tools, more realistic scenarios, and more targeted training was raised mostly by the attendants, thus stressing the importance of an evaluation activity extended to all the actors. Future research could deepen the outcomes through the application of quantitative techniques also to different scales and disasters.

The flood resilience capacity has been decreasing in Palma since the nineteenth century. Among the causes, the growth of the city toward coastal areas and former agricultural lands, both flood-prone locations once avoided. The increase of small flood events since the start of the twenty-first century highlights the inability of city authorities and inhabitants to cope with the existing risk and to find solutions to solve the problem. Results show that the urban expansion, largely without control during the final decades of the twentieth century, is the main cause of flood-related impacts and damages, while the lack of a public and private answer only increases the resilience failure.

In this chapter, building resilience of informal housing is explored based on the case of Honiara, Solomon Islands. Informal housing is severely impacted by natural hazards throughout the world. Institutional approaches towards informal housing vary widely, but there is now growing consensus that instead of eviction and relocation, in-situ upgrading offers positive outcomes. Given the limited work on informal settlements in the Pacific region compared to other parts of the Global South, a research agenda is identified focusing on this region. Much of the discourse on the Pacific region deals with coastal climate change impacts relating to global activities within the current Anthropocene Epoch, however, inland floods with damaging impacts, as evident for example in Honiara, is less covered, however, they are also related to the Anthropocene. This chapter thus focuses on the case study of Honiara, a rapidly urbanising city with a significant proportion of its population residing in informal housing. This is an issue that is strongly linked to global frameworks; there is of course a direct connection to the Sendai Framework for Disaster Risk Reduction, and also to the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), especially SDG 13 on Climate Action, and also SDG 10 on Reduced Inequalities and SDG 11 on Sustainable Cities and Communities. Flood impacts on informal housing built without legal tenure on exposed sites are pronounced because of the use of vulnerable building materials without following resilient construction guidelines. Local land-use planning and building codes largely do not recognise informal housing. There are nonetheless opportunities for building resilience of informal housing by drawing on the initiatives, networks and skills of informal housing residents. Thus, a potential framework for informal housing improvement is proposed based on such contextual factors. There is a need for further research to develop a comprehensive suite of design and construction guidelines specifically applicable for informal settlements in Honiara, which could also have relevance for the wider Pacific region.

Disasters are calamitous events bringing destruction and devastation to life and property. It influences the psychological, socio-economic, political, and cultural state of the populace of the affected area. Anthropocene changes the frequency, magnitude, and spatial distribution of disasters with time. These disasters undermine the progress toward Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). Disaster risk reduction and sustainable development are closely linked and interdependent. The 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development acknowledges the need to reduce the risk of disasters. SDG 11 and target 11.5 specifically focus on protecting the people with low income and residing invulnerable situations due to water-related disasters. Seventy-Six percent population of Bihar state in India lives under the constant threat of flood. In 2008, Bihar experienced severe floods affecting more than 2.3 million people in the northern region. From 2000 to 2019, floods affected more than 137 million population and caused 5,800 deaths in Bihar state. The local government plays a vital role in building resilience at varied spatial scales through strengthening adaptive capacity. This study aims at weighing the adaptive capacity of a district using disaggregated data at the community development block level for the flood-affected Kishanganj district of Bihar. The linkage of adaptive characteristics and vulnerabilities has been assessed using the frameworks of the World Bank and the International Union for Conservation of Nature. Adaptive Capacity Index determines critical infrastructure for adaptation at the community development block level in a district. It is calculated using the composite index approach for quantifying adaptive strategies. Analytical Hierarchy Process is used to rank adaptive strategies to suggest the institutional framework for coping with the disaster. The paper concludes that the Terhagachh community development block is the most vulnerable as it has the least adaptive measures in place whereas the Pothia community development block is more resilient to floods. The study ranked the institutional assistance and setup aspect as the topmost factors for determining the adaptive capacity of any region. The paper suggests using the Adaptive Capacity Index approach to monitor adaptive capacity and resource utilisation in flood-affected regions.

In the last few years, the interest in risk-related issues has grown in all social sciences, confirming that individual and collective behaviors and intervention policies are connected to certain perceptions of disasters. Communities are often the starting point as well as the recipients of such studies. In the tourism industry, the issue of safety and risk plays a fundamental role in the dynamics of hospitality and opens up many inquiries. Indeed, one of the risks connected to tourism is the environmental one: the sustainability of tourist flows in destinations or, even better, in host communities is often what determines the success or failure of certain types of tourism. The aim of this chapter is to investigate the ways in which a community, as a destination, perceives specific forms of risk linked to a type of tourism, here specifically the cruise tourism. Therefore, the case of Syracuse, Italy is taken into account, where (precisely near the historic center of Ortigia) in 2020, two cruise ships remained idle for four months, for a long technical stopover. The presence of the ships caused a controversy within the community, among those who considered the ships a potential danger for the environmental pollution and disfigurement of the landscape; and those who, on the other hand, saw opportunities for economic development even in the long term. This study, from a cultural geographical perspective, considered the public narratives produced by some local online newspapers, by analyzing a selection of significant articles about this controversy. The primary goal is to observe the ways in which those narratives are organized, as their “forms” show the (re)production of complex cultural dynamics.

The advent of the last Technological Revolution has completely upset long-entrenched relations among spaces, places and communication flows, by influencing the ways through which information is territorialized and, vice versa, territories are (re)shaped in the virtual dimension. In particular, the internet and the social web have further accelerated the increase in geo-tagged data which are co-created by not professional users. The increasing co-production of space-related information has also influenced risk perception and disaster management. On the one hand, a huge increase in disaster-related data flows diffused by institutional actors is due to a variegated range of purposes (prevention, on-site disaster management, real-time information). On the other hand, a significant amount of data is co-created and shared by users from the bottom-up while the disaster crisis is still unfolding, by integrating official informational sources. Theoretically inserted at the intersection between the Geography of Communication and the Geography of disaster, the chapter provides a theoretical review and a set of descriptive examples demonstrating the growingly pervasive role of ICTs in risk perception and management.

This chapter will discuss how environmental landscapes, and resources, have been historically weaponized and deployed as human induced hazards in the practice of warfare. The Integrated History and Future of People on Earth (IHOPE) project notes that “human history has traditionally been cast in terms of the rise and fall of great civilizations, wars, and specific human achievements. This history leaves out the important ecological and climate contexts that shaped and mediated these events. Human history and earth system history have traditionally been developed independently, with little interaction [...] Therefore, separate methods of describing these histories have been developed, and there have been few attempts to integrate these histories... across these fields of study.” Geography, in theory if not in practice, does incorporate and synthesize perspectives from the human and earth sciences. This chapter by employing the lenses of literary, cultural, and historical geography will explore the landscapes of warfare, the human use of environment and resources as weapons, and speculate on the Gaian planetary ‘counter-insurgency’ against homo-sapiens. If as Anthropocene discourses speculate—humans have indeed become ‘a geological force’—then the classical definition of geo-hazard needs to be modified from traditional precepts to include human induced environmental phenomena. This chapter will provide a selected history on the framing and use of nature as a weapon; secondly it will discuss the industrial and ecological development of war within Anthropocene discourses, and thirdly, reflect upon whether global warming and related phenomena constitute in chemist and biophysicist James Lovelock and microbiologist Lynn Margulis’ Gaian geo-biological reframing of Earth System Sciences, a sign that the “earth-goddess” is waging a counter insurgency against the millennial onslaughts of human civilization.

Sicily’s uneven geological structure is positioned within a system of tectonic plates. Its (very) active volcano, Mount Etna, has always made it prone to disasters. Nevertheless on the flanks of Etna there are many urbanized areas and the population living on the slopes of Etna has increased a lot in the last century, because there is an ancient and intimate relationship between the land and the people who live and work on the land. In this chapter I will try to investigate possible changes in the perception of the risks associated with the volcano by the resident population by conducting survey in the villages of Fleri, Pisano, Pennisi and Santa Maria la Stella. This study is part of a growing body of research on changes in the perception of risk in the Etna area.

This paper focuses on the concept of urban resilience and on some thematic declinations of the term, by comparing two case studies in Southern Italy: Matera (Basilicata) and Filadelfia (Calabria). The historical, social, and cultural processes manifesting in these cities can be viewed as symbols of sustainability and urban resilience. The latter is defined as the ability of a city’s systems, businesses, institutions, communities, and individuals to survive, adapt, and grow, regardless of the chronic stress and acute shocks they experience. In these two specific cases, different experiences, and similarities are narrated focusing attention on the contrasting paths to urban resilience and sustainability after such shocks. The hypothesis considered in this paper concerns the concept of urban resilience linked to socio-cultural structures. For example, Matera, transformed from the definition of a “national shame” to the European Capital of Culture in 2019, due to synergy between policymakers, stakeholders, and citizens. In comparison, Filadelfia, destroyed by an earthquake in 1783, was rebuilt on a solid, bottom-up approach, serving as an example of an innovative and resilient urban scheme.

Central Italy is sadly acknowledged as highly exposed to natural hazards and affected by ever-present disasters. The middle Adriatic coastal area of the Abruzzo Region has been severely affected by heavy rainfall and flood events in recent times. It is characterized by moderate to low annual precipitation and, occasionally, by serious rainfall events (up to 400–500 mm/day), which determine landscape modifications and geomorphological processes. Floods occurring in the study area revealed the state of vulnerability towards natural hazards posing a threat to human settlements, livelihoods, and properties, despite several mitigation activities carried out in the last decades. In the context of climate change, these events’ frequency has increased and continues to intensify, also in addition to the ever-increasing of anthropic activities. Only a high knowledge of geomorphological dynamics, connected to drainage network evolution, geological-geomorphological features, and meteorological events, can help develop practical mitigation activities and bridge the gap between disaster resilience and urban sustainability, advocated as one of the core elements of new urban agendas. This work could represent a scientific basis, readily available to interested stakeholders, for implementing sustainable territorial planning for disaster resilience assessment and management in urban and coastal landscapes.

The postmodern society has an urgent need to develop effective strategies in favor of land management and risk prevention: priority objectives that are among the components of resilience. A fundamental tool to achieve these goals is the shared knowledge of the environment where we live. Modern GIS effectively facilitates the whole society in this sense, thanks to its many functions. Moreover, it is perfectly compatible with the Landscape Ecology approach, which considers all the components that characterize the complexity of nature in an integrated way. Knowledge sharing is based on communication: new approaches privilege unconventional modes of communication based on people's emotional and experiential involvement. In this sense, sports in the natural environment become communicative vectors of the environment. Therefore, some case studies in the Marche region, recently hit by the earthquake, are examined. The project has taken care of the realization of a geo-hiking itinerary that connects various geosites of great landscape importance to offer society scientifically valid information about the territory during the tourist fruition of the same to raise awareness of the enhancement of the territory and risk prevention.

Earth’s climate has changed throughout history and regional changes in climate have already affected a diverse set of physical and biological systems in many parts of the world. The impacts depend on community’s vulnerability and exposure conditions, and mitigation and adaptation actions have been recognized as essential to meet the goals of global agendas (e.g., New Urban Agenda, Sustainable Development Goals and Sendai Framework). Adaptation measures seem to be less common compared to mitigation ones, probably for the limits on ecological, physical, economic, and technological dimensions. The objective of this study, conducted as part of the Interreg RESPONSe Project, is to analyze the resilience of local population in the Veneto Region in relation to the integration in the territory. Hence, the investigation focused on analyzing the locals’ perception of climate impacts on their daily life, their sense of place, and how perception and sense of place influence the willingness to take personal and collective actions to counteract climate change. Social and physical characteristics, local climate change scenarios, and the targeted adaptation approach of different communities have been examined. Results suggest that age and proximity to the coast are influencing factors in the response to climate change. For instance, younger people appear to acknowledge the shared personal responsibility of tackling such a challenge, while wishing for a broader community involvement. At the same time, the sense of belonging appears to support long-term, adaptation actions. Overall, the outcomes give hints about the key elements to consider when planning for improving local climate resilience.

The purpose of this contribution, which is to be included in the debate on risk mitigation policies and instruments or disaster support, is to describe the European Union Solidarity Fund (EUSF) intervention framework. This fund, created in 2002 and renewed in 2014, is an instrument capable of intervening retrospectively and on different levels on the territories affected by a natural event at high intensity. Since 2020, the operativity of the Fund has also extended to actions to combat the COVID-19 pandemic, representing, well before the composition of the so-called Recovery Fund, the first form of support against the economic and health disaster generated by the pandemic. Recalling the theoretical context, the contribution focuses on the description of the Fund and, with reference to Italy, identifies the resources allocated and maps the areas of intervention.