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How to improve coordination between formal and unaffiliated or spontaneous volunteers after emergencies is currently an international question with a high profile. Drawing on international disaster management literature and experiences and recent crisis events in Canada, our analysis examines four Canadian case studies to show that the inclusion of citizens in EM is becoming indispensable, as simultaneously as the frequency and intensity of natural disasters are seen to be growing due to climate change, and citizens are increasingly presenting their labour and resources as assets to be drawn on in emergency and postemergency situations. In this context, Canadian municipalities are starting to better manage the unpredictability of spontaneous citizen volunteering in emergencies by building anticipatory structures of networked governance for integrating diverse, pre‐existing, and in some cases, pre‐identified groups of citizens as volunteers in emergency management functions. Additionally, as the role of voluntary service organizations is becoming elevated in emergency response and recovery in Canada, these organizations can prospectively play the role of brokers to help emergency management agencies access and manage community‐based networks of voluntary resources. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The concept of resilience has captured the imagination of urbanists and city managers. While the literature on urban and regional resilience has proliferated, our understanding of resilience trade-offs that elected municipal officials and city staff make in their daily practice remains limited. This article addresses this lacuna by examining specific and general resilience trade-offs through a case study of urban and regional planning for floods and sea-level rise in Canada's Metro Vancouver region. We identify the mechanisms that ensure the maintenance of long-term options that are essential to the development of general resilience and highlight the barriers and forces that constrain the investment in general resilience. We find that while there are many examples of nuance and depth in practitioners' deliberations about resilience trade-offs involving fiscal, equity, spatial, temporal, and design dimensions, examples of the application of a consistent transparent framework to incorporate these trade-offs to support overall decision-making are lacking. We find that in the absence of such explicit frameworks, fiscal and political considerations tend to dominate. While there were some clear mechanisms to articulate trade-offs leading to specific resilience gains at the municipal level, the losses to general resilience at the regional level remained somewhat unintended and implicit. • The concept of resilience has captured the imagination of urbanists and city managers. • Our understanding of resilience trade-offs that elected officials and city staff make remains limited. • We examine specific and general resilience trade-offs in planning for floods and sea-level rise in Metro Vancouver, Canada. • We identify resilience trade-offs involving fiscal, equity, spatial, temporal, and design dimensions. • In the absence of an explicit decision-making framework for trade-offs, fiscal and political considerations tend to dominate. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Increasingly, countries around the world are adopting policies that emphasize the importance of partnerships for disaster resilience. The overarching questions that this paper investigates are how to form and sustain (1) effective collaborative arrangements involving governments, businesses, non-governmental organizations and communities to ensure development of disaster resilient communities, and (2) governance institutions that can effectively mobilize geographically dispersed disaster response resources with fragmented ownership. We have reviewed case studies of alternative inter-sectoral collaborative arrangements that were formed to (1) promote the development of resilient communities and critical physical and social systems; (2) mitigate or respond to emerging crises; or (3) facilitate post-disaster recovery and learning. We have developed grounded propositions articulating the antecedents of performance of inter-sectoral collaborative arrangements. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper explores the question of whether natural hazard risks for urban areas are growing or diminishing over time. While trends such as population growth in hazardous areas increase the potential for loss in disaster events, other factors, such as improved building codes, tend to reduce this risk. The net effects of such urban changes are examined through the use of simulation models that estimate disaster losses. In a comparative static approach, losses are modeled for the same hypothetical hazard event striking at different points in an urban area's development history. The analysis focuses on a case study of seismic hazard for the metropolitan area of Vancouver, Canada. Results of a casualty-estimation model applied retrospectively indicate that, for the same M7.3 seismic event, human casualties would have been similar if the earthquake had struck in 2006 as in 1971, even though the population at risk had doubled in the interim. This improvement in per capita casualty rate is largely due to building-code upgrades and changes in new construction. Other dimensions of risk worsened, however: the estimated population in significantly damaged buildings increased by some 60% for the region and, in some fast-growing municipalities, more than doubled. Using a similar analytical approach, a second modeling effort focused on transportation systems and considered the risk implications of future growth. Analysis compared transportation disruption in 2004 and 2021 for a constant earthquake hazard but a forecast 21% increase in traffic. Results indicate that, for the Vancouver metropolitan area overall, disaster risk to transportation is expected to decrease slightly due to the shifting geography of residences and workplaces. The spatial distribution of risk would change, however: in particular, it would worsen for the older urban core. Moreover, the relative importance of key bridges changed over time. The analyses here indicate that in this case study, risk is not worsening significantly overall but is undergoing notable spatial redistribution; however, the extent to which this finding can be generalized to other urban areas and types of hazards remains to be investigated. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]