Building Safer Communities. Risk Governance, Spatial Planning and Responses to Natural Hazards

Building Safer Communities. Risk Governance, Spatial Planning and Responses to Natural Hazards is a 2009 book edited by Urbano Fra Paleo, published by IOS Press.

Building Safer Communities. Risk Governance, Spatial Planning and Responses to Natural Hazards
AuthorUrbano Fra Paleo (editor)
CountryNetherlands
LanguageEnglish
SeriesHuman and Societal Dynamics
SubjectNatural hazards, Risk management
GenreEssay
PublisherIOS Press
Publication date
2009
Pages278 pages
ISBN978-1-60750-046-9
OCLC441170952
LC Class2009932645

This textbook examines the central principles of enhanced risk governance, whose implementation might help to mitigate the increasing losses caused by natural hazards. It promotes the adoption of proactive, preventive approaches in public policies, particularly through land use planning, by influencing on the occupation of hazard-prone areas. It serves both as a comprehensive introduction to the formulation and implementation at the strategic level of policies that address risk, and as an advancement in the integration of current practices, including emergency management, environmental management, community development and spatial planning. The authors study and construe solutions that review integrated strategies of the various levels of government considering:

  • The central role of local government in planning for mitigation,
  • The integration of mitigation with other social, economic and environmental goals,
  • The engagement of all stakeholders in mitigation planning,
  • The avoidance of disruption of environmental functions,
  • The need of integrating mandates of higher level government with cooperative planning in order to both secure local government participation and make planning sustainable,
  • Participatory decision-making processes need to be improved by differentiating among their types and applications, in order to effectively respond in risk management,
  • People perception of and response to risk must be part of the planning process,
  • Processes of human exposure to natural hazards should be fully understood in order to prevent further exposure,
  • The precautionary principle needs to be integrated in risk management, although under comprehensible regulation in order to promote action,
  • Urban risk governance can only be understood within the framework of regional and biophysical systems,
  • Social impact assessment is a tool that helps to better identify the social and community dimensions of risk,
  • Planning should be considered more as a process than as a result, and
  • Post-disaster recovery also provides opportunities for mitigation and community improvement.[1][2]

Urbano Fra Paleo is a geographer, and an Associate Professor of Human Geography at the University of Santiago de Compostela, Spain.

See also

References
  1. Building Safer Communities. Risk Governance, Spatial Planning and Responses to Natural Hazards
  2. Building Safer Communities. Risk Governance, Spatial Planning and Responses to Natural Hazards
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