Session Description
In an era of escalating climate crises and disasters, enhancing climate and disaster resilience is more crucial than ever if the 2030 Agenda is to be achieved. Within this global risk landscape, local communities bear the brunt of these crises. They are the societal arenas where climate and disaster risks are perceived, experienced, prevented and mitigated. Understanding how to recognise, engage, and empower local communities and their resilience is therefore key to effective disaster risk reduction (DRR) and climate action (CA) strategies, and the achievement of sustainable development (SD) worldwide. However, fully integrating DRR, CA, and SD into impact assessment (IA) demands a paradigm shift in IA from “managing the impacts of development” to “reducing its risks and enhancing community resilience”. Driving this evolution in IA requires a fundamental switch from externally imposed metrics and expert-driven assessments, toward rigorous, community resilience-based, and community-led assessments that connect prediction, prevention, mitigation, enhancement, monitoring, learning, and accountability across the entire project cycle for better DRR and CA outcomes to secure more just, resilient and sustainable futures. This session welcomes innovative contributions from scholars and practitioners exploring how this paradigm shift in IA for sustainable development can be operationalised. Specifically, we invite papers that examine how IA can genuinely engage local communities, enhance their resilience, and identify the critical conditions required for success.
Session Summary
This session explores shifting IA from managing development impacts to reducing its risks and enhancing community resilience, investigating how IA can engage communities and enhance their resilience for DRR and climate action outcomes. This session contributes to establishing a leading role for IA in sustainable development
Session Chair
Angelo Jonas Imperiale
University College Dublin
Ireland
Session Co-chair
Brian Cook
University of Melbourne
Australia