Release of a new journal entitled Disaster Prevention and Resilience

Although humanity has made great progress in the fields of science and technology, all kinds of natural and manmade disasters continue to threaten us and affect the progress of human civilization. Natural disasters, such as earthquakes, volcanic eruptions, floods, hurricanes, blizzards, cyclones, tornadoes, tsunamis, landslides, pandemics, and so on, are natural processes or phenomena often caused by natural variations, whereas human-instigated disasters, such as fires, transport accidents, industrial accidents, terrorist attacks, nuclear explosions/nuclear radiation, and so on, are the consequences of human activity. Associated with the global weather and environmental systems, various disaster events frequently occur in recent years. Moreover, the disaster effect will be enlarged along with the social development, urban growth, population concentration, and wealth accumulation. It is evident that the human living environment is becoming increasingly fragile. Therefore, natural or human-instigated disasters are still a worldwide problem facing society today. Since the activities of the International Decade for Natural Disaster Reduction was initiated by the United Nations in 1989, the global efforts on disaster prevention and mitigation have continued for more than 30 years.

The Sendai Framework for Disaster Risk Reduction 2015-2030 appeals to the countries around the world to give more efforts to the disaster mitigation by strengthening the disaster-resistance capacity, so as to reduce the losses caused by natural or human-instigated disasters. However, the built environment is a huge, open, and complex system, in which various uncertain factors and unpredicted risks are increasing. Resilience and sustainability are the main concerns of cities and communities. How to strengthen the city system’s capacities of resistance, recovery, and adaptivity against the unpredicted disaster risks has thus become a hotspot issue. Resilient city and sustainability are the critical themes in many global summits. It is recognized that the key scientific problems for building a resilient city or community can be summarized as follows: (1) mechanism of multi-hazard risks; (2) temporal-spatial uncertainties of coupling disaster actions; (3) uncertainty propagation of multi-hazard risks; (4) life-cycle performance of urban infrastructure systems; (5) catastrophic dynamics of complex structural systems; (6) evolution dynamics of urban disasters; (7) size effect of a resilient city and community; and (8) fundamentals of resilient city system.

The new journal, Disaster Prevention and Resilience (DPR), aims to serve as a widely recognized platform for timely dissemination of research results and new findings as well as to provide a broad forum for sharing valuable theories, methods, technologies, and strategies pertaining to the areas of disaster prevention and the resilient city system. The main areas of interest include the spectrum of topics: natural and humaninstigated disasters, e.g., earthquake, fire, flood, hurricane, geological disaster, extreme climate, environmental pollution, public health, and urban science; disaster risk perception and communication; disaster risk analysis; disaster risk-informed decision making; disaster risk reduction and management; disaster resilience of built environment; sustainability under global warming; social science/urban planning; and intelligent application and education in disaster prevention and resilience. The mission of the journal is to bring to the communities of researchers and practitioners innovative theories, promising methods, practical technologies, advanced strategies, and insightful case studies. We warmly welcome prospective authors to submit their new research or technological contributions to the journal DPR. We truly believe DPR will promote the research and applications of advanced theories, methods, and strategies for disaster prevention and risk management, helping to maintain the human, social, economic, and environmental aspects of sustainability.