Urban Resilience to Droughts and Floods The Role of Policies and Governance

This book focuses on policies and governance on how to build the resilience of cities to droughts and floods in the short-, medium-, and long-term. There are discussions on how cities prepare for, cope with, learn from, manage, and recover from these extreme events. The chapters also consider aspects such as changing paradigms, policy responses under uncertainty, scenario development, institutional responses, adaptive forecasting, governance perspectives, infrastructure development, overall investments, and technological innovation. The Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) and the Sendai Framework for Disaster Risk Reduction are discussed at length.Most of the cities and regions studied are in Asia, however, cities from Oceania, Europe, Africa,and North America are also included. Analyses are not limited to cities but to the basins and regions from which urban populations obtain their resources, and on which their resilience depends.This book was originally published as a special issue of the International Journal of Water Resources Development.

Introduction 1. Achieving the Sustainable Development Goals: improving water services in cities affected by extreme weather events 2. Using water management infrastructure to address both flood risk and the urban heat island 3. Antifragility and the development of urban water infrastructure 4. The impact of weather extremes on urban resilience to hydro-climate hazards: a Singapore case study 5. Environmental resilience and intergovernmental collaboration in the Pearl River Delta 6. Exposure and resilience of China’s cities to floods and droughts: a double-edged sword 7. The political economy of flood management reform in China 8. Governance of the Sponge City Programme in China with Wuhan as a case study 9. Towards adaptive governance for urban drought resilience: the case of Da Nang, Vietnam 10. Policy narratives help maintain institutional traps in the governance of floods in Thailand 11. Resilience in major Australian cities: assessing capacity and preparedness to respond to extreme weather events 12. Rainproof cities in the Netherlands: approaches in Dutch water governance to climate-adaptive urban planning 13. Devolving water governance in the Kenyan Arid Lands: from top-down drought and flood emergency response to locally driven water resource development planning

Cecilia Tortajada is a Senior Research Fellow at the Institute of Water Policy in the Lee Kuan Yew School of Public Policy at the National University of Singapore. She is the Editor-in-Chief of the International Journal of Water Resources Development.James Horne isthe former Deputy Secretary of the Australian Department of Sustainability, Environment, Water, Population and Communities and is now a Visiting Fellow at the Australian National University, Canberra, Australia.Larry Harrington isthe former Research Director of the CGIAR Challenge Programme on Water and Food (CPWF) and is now an Adjunct Professor at Cornell University, Ithaca, USA.