Building Resilient Cities Ep. 4: the role of insurance in cities’ resilience

As the world’s cities continue to expand, they become more vulnerable to destructive forces such as earthquakes, flooding, and air pollution. With India’s urban population expected to swell by an additional 400 million by 2050, and China forecasted to have an additional 300 million city dwellers, this is a pressing problem that spatial planning is helping to address.

Looking at city growth with a spatial lens

Professor Deborah Balk, from the University of New York, and AXA Research Fund Fellow, works on ways to better understand how a city grows to identify its vulnerabilities. It stresses that knowing which areas are exposed to what threats enables more effective preventative solutions to be put in place. Citizens want their cities to be more resilient and more livable, and the more we understand our cities the more we can do to improve them.

This is one episode of five short films with the AXA Research Fund and National Geographic to inspire understanding of the hazards faced by urban areas, and the ways in which we are working to minimize their impact and make the world’s cities safer. Other films in this series cover urban data and spatial planning, floods, and earthquakes. Discover all the episodes: click here.