Urban Resilience to Droughts and Floods ― The Role of Policies and Governance

This book focuses on policies and governance on how to build the resilience of cities to droughts and floods in the short-, medium-, and long-terms. There are discussions on how cities prepare for, cope with, learn from, manage, and recover from these extreme events. The chapters also consider aspects such as changing paradigms, policy responses under uncertainty, scenario development, institutional responses, adaptive forecasting, governance perspectives, infrastructure development, overall investments, and technological innovation. The Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) and the Sendai Framework for Disaster Risk Reduction are discussed at length.

Most of the cities and regions studied are in Asia, however cities from Oceania, Europe, Africa and North America are also included. Analyses are not limited to cities but to the basins and regions from which urban populations obtain their resources, and on which their resilience depends.

This book was originally published as a special issue of the International Journal of Water Resources Development.

Cecilia Tortajada is a Senior Research Fellow at the Institute of Water Policy in the Lee Kuan Yew School of Public Policy at the National University of Singapore. She is the Editor-in-Chief of the International Journal of Water Resources Development.

James Horne is the former Deputy Secretary of the Australian Department of Sustainability, Environment, Water, Population and Communities and is now a Visiting Fellow at the Australian National University, Canberra, Australia.

Larry Harrington is the former Research Director of the CGIAR Challenge Programme on Water and Food (CPWF) and is now an Adjunct Professor at Cornell University, Ithaca, USA.