Vulnerability, Resilience and Transformation of Urban Areas in the Coastal Megacity Lagos: Findings of Local Assessments and a Household Survey in Highly Exposed Areas

Abstract

Coastal urban regions in low-lying areas in developing countries are often hotspots of climate change related risks and therefore the analysis of different characteristics of vulnerability, resilience and transformation is an important prerequisite for planning and decision making. Even though the concepts of resilience and transformation have been discussed for some time, they often remain still very abstract. Against this background the following paper aims to illustrate how different characteristics of vulnerability: susceptibility, exposure and adaptation from resilience to transformative change can be assessed in practice at the level of individual households and different city districts. The household survey was conducted in four low-income, at risk areas in the coastal megacity of Lagos. It reveals important differences between the case study locations in jj Corresponding author. This is an Open Access article published by World Scientific Publishing Company. It is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 (CC-BY) License. Further distribution of this work is permitted, provided the original work is properly cited. J Extreme Events, Vol. 3, No. 3 (2016) terms of perceived capacities and actual responses of households to extreme events and creeping hazards. The analysis of behavioral changes undertaken after extreme events underscores that experience of loss and damage is an important stimulus for people to change their behavior. Moreover perception of actual and future risk management capacities and the performance of government institutions influences risk management regimes at the household level. It was found that at risk populations experienced both, inaction from government and individual households. This is a corrective to the majority literature that focuses on proactive local or government action. In fact, these examples of success may be quite rare and were not found in the four settlements studied in this research. The survey is part of a larger international project regarding the Transformation and Resilience of Urban Coasts (TRUC (2016). Transformation fo urban coasts Available at www.bel_truc.org) funded by the Belmont Forum and the DFG in particular in terms of the research in Lagos.

Disaster Preparedness and Resilience at Household Level in Yangon, Myanmar

“…Resilient societies are able to exibly respond to or cope with failures of critical infrastructure and to adapt and learn to keep societal life running (Birkmann et al 2016;Solecki et al 2017; United Nations 2020). This response includes private stockpiling of minimum supplies of water, food, communication facilities etc., as mentioned above.…”

“…Furthermore, an increased exibility in acting are educational outcomes with positive effects on preparedness and resilience (Hoffmann and Muttarak 2017). Indirect educational effects also increase the household resilience due to the associations between education and income, housing, and social and mental well-being (Birkmann et al 2016;Hoffmann and Muttarak 2017).…”

Assessing Socioeconomic Vulnerability after a Hurricane: A Combined Use of an Index-Based approach and Principal Components Analysis

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“…The second variable used in the Government factor was the Performance Perception of the Government in response to Hurricane Irma. Failures and inaction from governments were identified as a significant driver of present and future risk and can intensify the disaster impact [52,68]. Low-performance perception has a direct relation to households with a lower income and low level of education, houses that have shown low or non-changes in risk management at the household level [52].…”

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