Measures to Bolster Urban Resilience to Respond to Climate Change and Floods 

Han Woosuk, Associate Research Fellow, Korea Research Institute for Human Settlements  

Summary

1. (Current issues and problems) Due to climate change and urbanization, the risk of floods is on the rise. In cities, floods will very likely develop into natural disaster–triggered technological disasters. 

2. (Need to develop a disaster prevention policy with a concept of resilience) The concept of resilience should be introduced to shape disaster prevention policies that take account of actual disaster development as a precondition  

- Resilience includes hazard mitigation via disaster prevention and damage recovery that considers post-disaster response and prevention. 

3. (Need to improve hazard mitigation) For hazard mitigation, the disaster preventive urban plans that are in operation in Korea need to be improved, and an urban regeneration policy that takes accounts of disaster prevention needs to be formulated.   

4. (Need to adopt and improve the damage recovery measures) Since the measures have not been established in Korea, transport plans and pre-disaster recovery plans that are used overseas need to be introduced. 

5. (Improve the system to strengthen resilience) To improve effectiveness of policies for better resilience, the laws and institutions need to be improved in a way that connects the existing disaster prevention measures to policies for stronger resilience. 

Policy implications

① Flood risk data should be collected so that it can be universally used for various policies for stronger resilience. To that end, the current methods used to analyze disaster vulnerability should be improved. 

② Cooperation among all government organizations needs to be sought to implement the policy for stronger resilience in the second national climate change response measure that is currently in operation.  

③ To bolster the damage recovery capacity that Korea is not taking accounting of, related institutions needs to be adopted, such as emergency transport routes and pre-disaster recovery plans. 

④ The resilience capacity evaluation should be institutionalized for steady evaluation and monitoring. And a guideline needs to be set up to strengthen resilience in accordance with the evaluation. ​