2006 Hurricane Forecast and At-risk Cities

2006 Hurricane Forecast and At-risk Cities
Author: United States. Congress. Senate. Committee on Commerce, Science, and Transportation. Subcommittee on Disaster Prevention and Prediction
Publisher:
Total Pages: 42
Release: 2011
Genre: Emergency management
ISBN:

Gotham Unbound

Gotham Unbound
Author: Theodore Steinberg
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
Total Pages: 544
Release: 2014
Genre: History
ISBN: 147674128X

Presents the history of New York City as it was transformed over a four-hundred-year period by politicians and developers from a Hudson River estuary with rolling hills, rivers, and forests into the concrete flatland that exists today.

State of the World 2007

State of the World 2007
Author: Worldwatch Institute
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
Total Pages: 292
Release: 2007
Genre: Business & Economics
ISBN: 9780393329230

"Top-ranked annual books on sustainable development."--GlobeScan survey of sustainability experts

Climate Resilient Cities

Climate Resilient Cities
Author: Neeraj Prasad
Publisher: World Bank Publications
Total Pages: 186
Release: 2009-02-19
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 0821377752

'Climate Resilient Cities: A Primer on Reducing Vulnerabilities to Disasters' provides city administrators with exactly what they need to know about the complex and compelling challenges of climate change. The book helps local governments create training, capacity building, and capital investment programs for building sustainable, resilient communities. A step-by-step self-assessment challenges policymakers to think about the resources needed to combat natural disasters through an innovative hot spot risk and vulnerability identifi cation tool. This primer is unique from other resources in its treatment of climate change using a dual-track approach that integrates both mitigation (lowering contributions to greenhouse gases) and adaptation (preparing for impacts of climate change) with disaster risk management. The book is relevant both to cities that are just beginning to think about climate change as well as those that already have well established policies, institutions, and strategies in place. By providing a range of city-level examples of sound practices around the world, the book demonstrates that there are many practical actions that cities can take to build resilience to climate change and natural disasters.

Adapting to Climate Change in Urban Areas

Adapting to Climate Change in Urban Areas
Author: David Satterthwaite
Publisher: IIED
Total Pages: 124
Release: 2007
Genre: Cities and towns
ISBN: 184369669X

This paper discusses the possibilities and constraints for adaptation to climate change in urban areas in low- and middle-income nations. These contain a third of the world's population and a large proportion of the people and economic activities most at risk from sea-level rise and from the heatwaves, storms and floods whose frequency and/or intensity climate change is likely to increase. Section I outlines both the potentials for adaptation and the constraints. Section II discusses the scale of urban change. Section III considers direct and indirect impacts of climate change on urban areas and which nations, cities and population groups are particularly at risk. This highlights how prosperous, well-governed cities could generally adapt, but most of the world's urban population lives in cities or smaller urban centres ill-equipped for adaptation. A key part of adaptation concerns infrastructure and buildings - but much of the urban population in Africa, Asia and Latin America lack the infrastructure to adapt. Most international agencies have long refused to support urban programmes, especially those that address these problems. Section IV discusses innovations by urban governments and community organizations and in financial systems that address such problems, including the relevance of recent innovations in disaster-risk reduction for adaptation. It notes how few city and national governments are taking any action on adaptation. Section V discusses how local innovation in adaptation can be encouraged and supported at national scale, and the funding needed to support this. Section VI considers the mechanisms for financing this and the larger ethical challenges that achieving adaptation raises - especially the fact that most climate-change-related urban (and rural) risks are in low-income nations with the least adaptive capacity, including many that have contributed very little to greenhouse-gas emissions.

Crisis Cities

Crisis Cities
Author: Kevin Fox Gotham
Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA
Total Pages: 353
Release: 2014
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 0199752214

Gotham and Greenberg contend that New York and New Orleans have emerged as paradigmatic crisis cities, representing a free-market approach to post-disaster redevelopment that is increasingly dominant for crisis-stricken cities around the world. Crisis Cities questions the widespread narrative of resilience and reveals the uneven and contradictory effects of redevelopment activities in the two cities.

Enhancing Urban Safety and Security

Enhancing Urban Safety and Security
Author: Un-Habitat
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 482
Release: 2012-08-21
Genre: Architecture
ISBN: 1136567070

Enhancing Urban Safety and Security addresses three major threats to the safety and security of cities: crime and violence; insecurity of tenure and forced evictions; and natural and human-made disasters. It analyses worldwide trends with respect to each of these threats, paying particular attention to their underlying causes and impacts, as well as to the good policies and best practices that have been adopted at the city, national and international levels in order to address these threats. The report adopts a human security perspective, concerned with the safety and security of people rather than of states, and highlights issues that can be addressed through appropriate urban policy, planning, design and governance.