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Reducing disaster risk for the poor in tomorrow’s cities with computational science

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Rapid urban expansion presents a major challenge to delivering the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals. Urban populations are forecast to increase by 2.2 billion by 2050, and business as usual will condemn many of these new citizens to lives dominated by disaster risk. This need not be the case. Computational science can help urban planners and decision-makers to turn this threat into a time-limited opportunity to reduce disaster risk for hundreds of millions of people.

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Fig. 1: Building resilience to disasters using a virtual city, Tomorrowville.

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Acknowledgements

We acknowledge funding from UKRI GCRF under grant NE/S009000/1 ‘Tomorrow’s Cities Hub’.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. School of Geosciences, University of Edinburgh, Edinburgh, UK

    John McCloskey

  2. Institute for Risk and Disaster Reduction, University College London, London, UK

    Mark Pelling, Thaisa Comelli, Tanvi Deshpande & Roberto Gentile

  3. Department of Civil, Environmental and Geomatic Engineering, University College London, London, UK

    Carmine Galasso & Gemma Cremen

  4. Kandilli Observatory and Earthquake Research Institute, Boğaziçi University, Istanbul, Turkey

    Emin Yahya Menteşe

  5. School of Built Environment and Engineering, Leeds Beckett University, Leeds, UK

    Max Hope

  6. National Society for Earthquake Technology, Kathmandu, Nepal

    Ramesh Guragain

  7. Human Settlement Group, International Institute for Environment and Development, London, UK

    Alejandro Barcena

Authors
  1. John McCloskey
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  2. Mark Pelling
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  3. Carmine Galasso
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  4. Gemma Cremen
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  5. Emin Yahya Menteşe
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  6. Max Hope
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  7. Thaisa Comelli
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  8. Tanvi Deshpande
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  9. Ramesh Guragain
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  10. Alejandro Barcena
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  11. Roberto Gentile
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Contributions

This was a collaborative project. J.McC. drafted the paper and all the other authors edited and contributed according to their expertise.

Corresponding author

Correspondence to John McCloskey.

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The authors declare no competing interests.

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McCloskey, J., Pelling, M., Galasso, C. et al. Reducing disaster risk for the poor in tomorrow’s cities with computational science. Nat Comput Sci 3, 722–725 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1038/s43588-023-00521-3

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/s43588-023-00521-3

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