Urban Flood Resilience: Tackling Flood Risk and Inequality in Cities

Date: 24 Oct 2024

We're excited to invite you to our upcoming Cities on the Frontline session, "Urban Flood Resilience: Tackling Flood Risk and Inequality in Cities.”

Urban flooding represents a critical development challenge worldwide. Currently, hundreds of millions of people, particularly in vulnerable communities, face increasing risks from flooding events. These floods can have severe consequences, including contamination of water sources, spread of waterborne diseases, significant economic disruption, and property damage from water, debris, and sediment. Most critically, flooding events continue to endanger human lives across the globe.

The causes and impacts of urban flooding are evolving rapidly. Urban development pressures have led to expansion into flood-prone areas, both riverine and coastal, often in violation of zoning regulations and disrupting natural drainage patterns. This situation is further exacerbated by rapid urbanization, population growth, and the impacts of climate change. These combined factors are not only altering flood patterns but also amplifying their negative impacts on communities.

Building urban resilience against flooding requires strategic investment in flood protection infrastructure, with a particular focus on safeguarding vulnerable populations. It is essential to protect critical infrastructure and implement preventive measures to minimize impacts on public health and local economies. In response to these challenges, municipalities and governments globally are adopting innovative approaches, integrated flood management strategies, and sustainable investment in resilient infrastructure.

The seventh Cities on the Frontline session of 2024, a collaborative effort between the Resilient Cities Network and the World Bank's Cities Resilience Program, will address these critical issues. The session will showcase data and modeling tools for flood risk assessment, examine the relationship between flooding and socioeconomic vulnerability, and present valuable case studies from Austria and Tanzania on scalable, cost-effective flood prevention strategies.

To register to attend please click here

Cities on the Frontline is a virtual thought leadership speaker series. The series, which began in 2020 co-organized by the Resilient Cities Network and the World Bank Group’s City Resilience Program, provides city practitioners and the industries and residents that they support, an understanding and means for responding to the pandemic and associated stresses, as well as solutions for planning towards a more resilient recovery.