Increasing Coastal Disaster Resilience Using Smart City Frameworks: Current State, Challenges, and Opportunities

Fahim Nawroz Tonmoy,Rodger Tomlinson,Samiul Hasan

doi:10.3389/frwa.2020.00003

Fahim Nawroz Tonmoy, Rodger Tomlinson + Show 1 more

Open Access

https://doi.org/10.3389/frwa.2020.00003

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Abstract

Sea-level rise, storm surges, and floods in coastal cities have already threatened large population and infrastructure with potential to increase significantly in future as climate changes. Therefore, increasing disaster resilience has become a major priority for coastal cities. At the same time, recent development in information and communication technology, ubiquitous sensors, and advanced data science allow us to generate insights that were unimaginable before and can assist in better managing coastal disaster risks. In this paper, using an infrastructure resilience lens, we critically review a set of academic literature that focus on the new development of smart systems in coastal disaster management and a set of use cases that focus on their practical application in different coastal cities. We find that smart city technologies such as internet of things (IoT) and crisis informatics have significant potential and have been increasingly used in academic studies but their city-scale applications in coastal disaster management have been limited. We discuss the challenges and opportunities of using smart city frameworks for increasing disaster resilience of coastal communities.

Highlights

Natural hazard events have been an ongoing element in the coastal regions around the world
Some of the specialized type of application include analysis of georeferenced data and dissemination of alarms and notifications. This is beyond the scope of this paper to present detailed smart city frameworks and for more information readers are directed to following references (Alazawi et al, 2014; Sanchez et al, 2014; Scuotto et al, 2016). We investigate how this generic framework has been used for the coastal disaster management in cities
After investigating the development trends in the academic literature, we investigated, how cities are embracing some of these smart city features for managing their coastal disasters

Summary

Introduction

Natural hazard events have been an ongoing element in the coastal regions around the world. Population density in the hazard-prone coastal areas and megacities is expected to grow by 25% by 2050 (Hallegatte et al, 2013). A rise in sea level is likely to increase the frequency and impacts of these episodic coastal hazard events. In 2005, average global flood losses in the world’s largest 131 coastal cities was approximately US$6 billion per year with the potential to increase to US$52 billion per year by 2050 due to sea level rise (Hallegatte et al, 2013). Increasing resilience of our coastal cities, their infrastructure systems and community in general to these episodic natural disasters is very critical

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