The severe damage and impacts caused by extreme events in a changing climate will not only make the sustainable development goals difficult to achieve, but also erode the hard-won development gains of the past. This article reviews the major impacts and challenges of disaster and climate change risks on sustainable development, and summarizes the courses and linkages of disaster risk reduction (DRR), climate change adaptation (CCA), and sustainable development over the past 30 years. Our findings show that the conceptual development of DRR actions has gone through three general phases: disaster management in the 1990s, risk management in the 2000s, and resilient management and development in the 2010s. Gradually, CCA has been widely implemented to overcome the adverse effects of climate change. A framework is proposed for tackling climate change and disaster risks in the context of resilient, sustainable development, indicating that CCA is not a subset of DRR while they have similarities and differences in their scope and emphasis. It is crucial to transform governance mechanisms at different levels, so as to integrate CCA and DRR to reduce disaster and climate change risks, and achieve safe growth and a resilient future in the era of the Anthropocene.

In this paper, we developed an integrated methodology for assessing asset damage, production capacity loss, and inter-sector ripple loss using the depth-damage curve, Cobb-Douglas production function and Input-Output model. We applied this methodology to the detailed individual manufacturing firms in Shanghai under an extreme storm floods scenario to simulate the disaster impact propagation from local individual firms to the entire industrial system and comprehensively estimate the resulting economic losses and their spatial distribution. Our results show that given no floodwall protection, a 1000-year storm flood scenario would cause direct asset damage of US $21 billion to the Shanghai manufacturing industry, including fixed asset damage of US $12 billion and inventory damage of US $9 billion. Due to the shortage of input productive factors of asset and labor, it would further lead to production capacity loss of US $24 billion. In addition, affected manufacturing industry would indirectly result in ripple loss of US $60 billion among dependent sectors, which has a significant amplifier effect. Our results have important implications for reasonable cost-benefit analysis of structural flood control measures in coastal areas, as well as for manufacturing firm location planning and resilience strategy decision-making.

Extreme flooding usually causes huge losses of residential buildings and household properties, which is critical to flood risk analysis and flood resilience building in Shanghai. We developed a scenario-based multidisciplinary approach to analyze the exposure, losses and risks of residential buildings and household properties, and their spatial patterns at the neighborhood committee level in Shanghai, based on extreme storm flood scenarios of 1/200, 1/500, 1/1000 and 1/5000-year. Our findings show that the inundation area of the residential buildings caused by a 1/200-year storm flood reaches 24.9 km², and the total loss of residential buildings and household properties is 29.7 billion CNY (Chinese Yuan) (or 4.4 billion USD), while the inundation area of residential buildings and the total loss increases up to 162.4 km² and 366.0 billion CNY (or 54.2 billion USD), respectively for a 1/5000-year storm flood. The estimated average annual loss (AAL) of residential buildings and household properties for Shanghai is 590 million CNY/year (or 87.4 million USD/year), with several hot spots distributed around the main urban area and on the bank of the Hangzhou Bay. Among sixteen districts, Pudong has the highest exposure and annual expected loss, while the inner city is also subject to extreme flooding with an AAL up to near half of the total. An analysis of flood risk in each of 209 subdistricts/towns finds that those most vulnerable to storm flooding are concentrated in Pudong, Jiading, Baoshan Districts and the inner city. Our work can provide meaningful information for risk-sensitive urban planning and resilience building in Shanghai. The methodology can also be used for risk analysis in other coastal cities facing the threat of storm flooding.

Purpose: Quantitative and spatial-explicit flood risk information is of great importance for strengthening climate change adaptation and flood resilience. Shanghai is a coastal megacity at large estuary delta with rising flood risks. This study aims to quantify the overall economic-societal risks of storm flooding and their spatial patterns in Shanghai.Design/methodology/approach: Based on multiple storm flood scenarios at different return periods, as well as fine-scale data sets including gridded GDP, gridded population and vector land-use, a probabilistic risk model incorporating geographic information system is used to assess the economic-societal risks of flooding and their spatial distributions.Findings: Our results show that, from 1/200 to 1/5,000-year floods, the exposed assets will increase from USD 85.4bn to USD 657.6bn, and the direct economic losses will increase from USD 3.06bn to USD 52bn. The expected annual damage (EAD) of assets is around USD 84.36m. Hotpots of EAD are mainly distributed in the city center, the depressions along the upper Huangpu River in the southwest, the north coast of Hangzhou Bay, and the confluence of the Huangpu River and Yangtze River in the northeast. From 1/200 to 1/5,000-year floods, the exposed population will rise from 280 thousand to 2,420 thousand, and the estimated casualties will rise from 299 to 1,045. The expected annual casualties (EAC) are around 2.28. Hotspots of casualties are generally consistent with those of EAD.Originality/value: In contrast to previous studies that focus on a single flood scenario or a particular type of flood exposure/risk in Shanghai, the findings contribute to an understanding of overall flood risks and their spatial patterns, which have significant implications for cost-benefit analysis of flood resilience strategies.

Manufacturing firms in flood prone areas (FPAs) are a vital component of flood exposure, driving the non-stationarity of flood risks. This paper explores the spatiotemporal patterns of manufacturing firms in the FPAs of Yangtze Delta in China during 1998-2013. It is found that the number of firms in the FPAs increases remarkably by 44,385, with an annual growth rate of 10.2%. Established firms are located much closer to water bodies, mainly agglomerating along the coasts, the Yangtze River, and around the Taihu Lake. Several vulnerable sectors, including chemical feedstock and chemical manufacturing, computer and communication equipment, maintain a high growth and share in the FPAs. The small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) with less flood coping capabilities increase rapidly. The main drivers of firm expansion in the FPAs include policy promotion, agglomeration benefit and levee effect. Exposed firms show a high spatial co-locality with industrial parks and an upward trend similar to the length of levees, suggesting that government policies and flood defense strategies encourage flood exposure. The increase in exposed firms is positively correlated with the rise of flood losses in industrial sectors. Besides defense strategies, more attention should be paid to enhancing flood resilience at regional and firm levels.