About this Research Topic
As underlined within the UN SDGs related to water and sustainable cities, improving urban water infrastructures management has become a growing priority for all cities across the globe in face of population growth, climate change, urbanisation and maintenance infrastructures within the context of developed and developing countries. These stresses represent huge challenges in the context of disaster management. Keeping up a good level of service is of paramount importance to enable a community to recover rapidly from system failures caused by natural disasters and other disturbing events affecting the water infrastructures.
The resilience concept emerges gradually in public strategies related to flood risk management. While risk-based approaches provide a rational way of weighting the costs of mitigation and adaptation measures, resilience embraces the uncertainties associated with natural hazards by focusing on the ability of an affected system to absorb extreme shocks and to regenerate a good level of service.
However, improving resilience is not trivial. Resilience entails ambiguous concepts, multidisciplinary origins and various metrics. The lack of clarity and unifying definition poses challenges to operationalizing resilience, but it also creates opportunities.
This Research Topic on resilience of the urban water infrastructure is about challenges but also opportunities. We would like to encourage papers answering the following research questions:
- How should resilience be translated into practice?
- What should the main attributes of resilience be within the perspective of water infrastructures?
- Are there different levels of resilience to be considered for an operational approach?
- Should resilience become the main objective within the risk management cycle?
- How to include climate change information in resilience planning and risk assessment frameworks?
Papers on a much broader range of topics than urban water infrastructures are encouraged. Suggested topics include, but are not limited to:
- climate change adaptation;
- urban flood disaster management;
- flood risk/resilience management;
- risk/resilience modelling;
- smart water systems;
- early warning systems;
- nature based solutions;
- interdependencies between water infrastructure and other systems;
- multi-hazard analysis and management;
- use of new technologies (such as unmanned aerial vehicles) for disaster management;
- machine learning approaches for disaster management.
The resilience concept emerges gradually in public strategies related to flood risk management. While risk-based approaches provide a rational way of weighting the costs of mitigation and adaptation measures, resilience embraces the uncertainties associated with natural hazards by focusing on the ability of an affected system to absorb extreme shocks and to regenerate a good level of service.
However, improving resilience is not trivial. Resilience entails ambiguous concepts, multidisciplinary origins and various metrics. The lack of clarity and unifying definition poses challenges to operationalizing resilience, but it also creates opportunities.
This Research Topic on resilience of the urban water infrastructure is about challenges but also opportunities. We would like to encourage papers answering the following research questions:
- How should resilience be translated into practice?
- What should the main attributes of resilience be within the perspective of water infrastructures?
- Are there different levels of resilience to be considered for an operational approach?
- Should resilience become the main objective within the risk management cycle?
- How to include climate change information in resilience planning and risk assessment frameworks?
Papers on a much broader range of topics than urban water infrastructures are encouraged. Suggested topics include, but are not limited to:
- climate change adaptation;
- urban flood disaster management;
- flood risk/resilience management;
- risk/resilience modelling;
- smart water systems;
- early warning systems;
- nature based solutions;
- interdependencies between water infrastructure and other systems;
- multi-hazard analysis and management;
- use of new technologies (such as unmanned aerial vehicles) for disaster management;
- machine learning approaches for disaster management.
Keywords: urban water infrastructures, disaster management, resilience, floods, early warning systems
Important Note: All contributions to this Research Topic must be within the scope of the section and journal to which they are submitted, as defined in their mission statements. Frontiers reserves the right to guide an out-of-scope manuscript to a more suitable section or journal at any stage of peer review.
