Expanding Coastal Cities: An Increasing Risk

Coastal cities are home to a significant proportion of the population of society. From time immemorial, people have been living on the coast to meet their various needs. However, over the last few decades, more people and infrastructure has moved to the coast than ever before. For example, in China, the number of people moving to coastal areas was three times higher than the national average, and in Asia in general, coastal cities have expanded on an unprecedented scale and are still growing. An extremely sophisticated and vast infrastructure is being developed in coastal areas of several Asian countries to expand production and trade opportunities. This chapter will discuss a few cases concerning coastal cities in Asia. It will include demographic expansion, trends in disaster risk, prevailing socioeconomic conditions, structure of local governance and its priorities in risk reduction activities, community engagement in risk reduction, and other aspects of selected cities. The chapter will also cover some recent initiatives in addressing risk in coastal communities and their merits in advancing the resilience of coastal cities.