This August Hazardous Webinar explored how major cities face multi-dimensional, compounding and cascading disaster risks intensified by climate change.
RMIT University researchers, Prof Jago Dodson, Dr Annette Kroen and Prof John Fien from the Natural hazards and resilience in complex urban systems project explored frameworks for mapping vulnerabilities, prioritising resilience investments, and translating research into practical guidance for policymakers and practitioners. The complexity of cities as open, adaptive, multi-level systems makes hazard risk management challenging, requiring multi-scale collaboration across governments, communities and sectors.
The presentation highlighted Resilient Sydney’s coordinated strategy among 33 councils, emphasising community engagement, equity and governance to build systemic resilience against shocks such as climate change, disasters, and social stresses.
Key takeaways:
- Complex urban systems face multi-dimensional, cascading disaster risks intensified by climate change.
- Cities are complex adaptive systems with open boundaries, requiring multi-level governance and coordination.
- Resilient Sydney is a collaborative network of 33 councils working to build equitable, community-led urban resilience.
- The project offers practical guidance tools to map vulnerabilities and prioritise resilience investments.
- Addressing systemic issues like inequality and governance fragmentation is crucial for effective resilience.
- Resilience involves not just bouncing back but adapting, transforming, and building forward better.
- Multi-scale collaboration—from local to global—is essential to manage systemic risks and build resilience.
Key webinar insights:
- Systemic risk in urban resilience: Cities are complex adaptive systems where risks compound and cascade across interconnected social, economic and ecological systems, making linear cause-effect disaster planning inadequate. This demands holistic approaches that recognise nonlinear interactions and emergent properties within urban environments.
- Multi-scale governance is essential: Effective resilience planning requires coordination across local councils, state governments and federal agencies. Resilient Sydney exemplifies how regional collaboration among 33 councils enables efficient resource use, shared data, and cohesive response strategies, addressing the complexity and scale of urban hazards.
- Beyond engineering resilience: Resilience is not only about infrastructure and physical defences but also socio-ecological and transformational resilience that tackle underlying social inequalities, governance challenges, and community capacity, fostering adaptive and equitable urban futures.
- Practical tools enhance decision making: The development of guidance tools for mapping vulnerabilities and prioritising investments supports policymakers and practitioners in translating complex research into actionable strategies, filling a critical gap between theory and practice.
- Community engagement builds trust and capacity: Resilience strategies benefit from deep, inclusive community involvement, which strengthens social cohesion, raises awareness, and supports tailored, place-based responses to hazards and stresses. This is especially important given decreasing trust in government and rising social isolation in urban areas.
- Inequality amplifies vulnerability: Systemic vulnerabilities linked to socio-economic disparities and demographic factors increase disaster risk and complicate resilience efforts. Addressing equity is fundamental to reducing the social and spatial unevenness of resilience capacities within cities.
- Adaptive and transformative responses are critical: The panel emphasised “precovery” (preparing for recovery before disruption) and the need for resilience strategies that enable cities not only to absorb shocks but to transform systems and reduce future risks through innovation and social justice-oriented policies.
This comprehensive approach to urban resilience in the face of natural hazards underscores the need for integrated, multi-sectoral, and multi-scale collaborations to futureproof cities against growing climate and disaster challenges.
Watch the webinar replay below.