Supporting risk assessment in building resilient cities

In the past century, the occurrence of natural disasters and man‐made disasters has steadily increased with a significant loss of life, damage to infrastructure and property and destruction of the environment. Therefore creation of resilient cities is a major concern in sustainability in order to provide a safer environment for the citizens. Within this context, risk assessment is an important phase of any Integrated Emergency Management process and forms the foundation for prevention, preparation and response towards building resilient cities. However, there are several limitations in the current approaches for conducting risk assessments in disaster prone areas, such as lack of theoretical frameworks for identifying the level of vulnerability of a place, weak multi‐agency collaboration, unavailability of comprehensive technology platforms for exploring local risks through interaction and visualisation and so on. This chapter summarises the challenges that should be addressed in strengthening the current risk assessment practices for creating resilient cities