Stanford
Urban Resilience Initiative

Changing Risk of Cities

Cities such as Kathmandu are growing rapidly.  Much of the growth is materialized through incremental construction, with little regard for the impact of building extensions on their vulnerability.

More risk and more uncertainty over time

The risk of cities increases with growing exposure and vulnerability.  Capturing these trends is key to implementing disaster resilient policy.

The dramatic urban transformation of the past century has shifted the landscape of risk, with cities becoming the major source of global risk. Yet current risk assessment models fall short in characterizing the spatial and temporal dynamics of the urban environments in terms of rapidly changing local exposure and vulnerability, often leading to large underestimation of risk.

The research team has developed a framework for analyzing earthquake disaster risk as it changes in time, driven by changing exposure and vulnerability. The framework is applied to a Kathmandu, Nepal as the main case-study.

Contributors

David Lallemant

Anne Kiremidjian

Henry Burton

Jack Baker

Partners

GFDRR

World Bank