RESEARCH ARTICLE
Resilience of Inland Urban Areas to Disasters Occurred Due to Extreme Precipitations
Saja Kosanović1, *, Linda Hildebrand2, Gordana Stević3, Alenka Fikfak4
Article Information
Identifiers and Pagination:
Year: 2015Volume: 1
Issue: Suppl 1-M5
First Page: 41
Last Page: 51
Publisher Id: OUSDJ-1-41
DOI: 10.2174/2352631901401010041
Article History:
Received Date: 10/6/2015Revision Received Date: 15/6/2015
Acceptance Date: 15/6/2015
Electronic publication date: 31/12/2015
Collection year: 2015
open-access license: This is an open access article licensed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-Non-Commercial 4.0 International Public License (CC BY-NC 4.0) (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/legalcode), which permits unrestricted, non-commercial use, distribution and reproduction in any medium, provided the work is properly cited.
Abstract
Among possible manifestations of climate change, which, according to predictions for coming period, may occur in different regions of Europe, are the extreme precipitations. These events, often accompanied by storms, may further lead to a whole series of consequences in urban environment and to the occurrence of disasters, such as massive floods. Starting from the description of case of Serbia floods 2014, this paper identifies some of the past human mistakes with experienced (and possibly future) catastrophic consequences, gives overview of future climate change expectations in terms of extreme precipitation occurrence, considers possible negative implications on urban population, built environment and functions, and defines resilient city concept. Finally, the paper introduces strategic proposal on achieving flood-resilient cities. Proposed concept deals both with the mitigation of past errors and the introduction of new, climate-resilient practice in further urban development. Time gap between future (with supposed achieved resilience) and present moment (with supposed high level of vulnerability and therefore risks) is overcome by definition of priorities and introduction of three different time-related categories of actions and results: immediate, short-term and long-term. Achieving social preparedness for possible extreme weather events represents the first important step in reducing the possibility of their negative transformation into disaster.
