At PLUS - Governance of Risk, we are concerned with the nexus of natural hazards, climate change and vulnerability as drivers of complex, multi-hazard risks in human settlements. We explore how cities and regions could respond to the shocks that are or will likely affect them and investigate the impacts that these shocks and the envisaged responses may have on people and places. In projects, such as the Integrated Flood Management in Kampala, we explore how the outputs from spatial models of urban growth and dynamic hazard models can be used to create scenarios of future flood risk that inform collaborative decision making by involving residents of flood prone areas, civil society organizations and government authorities in identifying risk reduction strategies and measures to increase flood resilience.
Our work seeks to develop effective spatial development strategies and responses, pertaining to adaptation, mitigation and transformations that increase community and/or societal resilience. We explore these responses in fields such as transport and energy, but also by understanding how to build resilient urban communities (e.g., SES, Coolschools, BREUCOM), through our work in land consolidation for disaster resilience, or through the development of collaborative spatial planning tools to strengthen community engagement in highly sensitive adaptation measures that involve involuntary resettlement.
We are also contributing to a better understanding of the impacts associated with risks and disasters, for example in the HABITABLE project that investigates displacement due to climate change and migration in the African transition zone.
Our work contributes to PGM’s joint vision to empower society with specialized knowledge and expertise on spatial and temporal interactions between people, land tenure, land use, urban systems, the environment and the underlying governance processes to support inclusive planning and decision-making that builds community and societal resilience. We share our knowledge and expertise on the governance of risk through collaborations in the Centre for Disaster Resilience.
At PLUS we stand for People, Land and Urban Systems, and this is how we contribute towards Governance of Risk.