Cities at risk – CAR II

This week I’m at the second Cities at Risk conference CAR II, subtitled Building Adaptive Capacities for Managing Climate Change Risks in Asian Coastal Cities. The conference is co-organised by START, the East-West Center and CCaR (Canada). START is the global change SysTem for Analysis, Research and Training. START helps developing countries build the expertise and knowledge needed to explore the drivers of and solutions to global and regional environmental change. The conference is hosted in Taiwan by Academia Sinica, the Taiwanese Academy of Science. They are somewhat different to the usual academy in that they carry out a great deal of research, acting as a national research organisation. The conference also roughly coincides with the opening of the the International Research on Disaster Risk (IRDR) International Center of Excellence at Academia Sinica.

The conference is a combination of invited and submitted papers. The working theme of the conference covers adaptation, disaster, risk, vulnerability and sustainable development. Most of the presentations cover case studies in Asian cities, large and small. They range from top-down studies improving technical measures to reduce risk to bottom-up studies addressing the social aspect if risk and vulnerability. The challenge is to bring these together.

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