Alan T. Murray (p)

Edoardo Baldoni

Fire has naturally occurred over millions of years, and death and destruction due to fire are substantial even today. Questions of sustainability cannot be meaningfully addressed without accounting for fire and other natural and human caused disasters, yet they are rarely if ever considered. This paper discusses fire risk and vulnerability in the context of sustainability. Efforts that seek out co-existence strategies for making urban and wildland environments more resilient to the inevitable occurrence of fire are detailed. Examples of monitoring and mitigation approaches in coastal Southern California highlight preliminary work in this area.

Orit Rotem-mindali (p)

Alan Murray

Public spaces such as parks, retail centers, bus stops, and street corners are fundamental to urban life, providing crucial venues for social and recreational activities. However, these spaces can sometimes foster feelings of alienation, fear, and perceived danger, affecting residents' sense of safety. This perception is vital as it influences mobility, impacting community life, travel patterns, transportation choices, and broader aspects like the economy, sustainability, and public health.

Literature has recognized physical environmental elements as predictors of perceived safety. The role of virtual elements, particularly in the realm of Information Communication Technologies (ICT), is also crucial. Despite advancements in understanding safety perceptions, few studies have comprehensively addressed both physical and virtual dimensions. This study aims to analyze the reciprocal effects of ICT and environmental design on pedestrian safety perceptions. Notably, it examines the differing perceptions of fear among women and men pedestrians in public spaces. The sense of fear and the actual risk of assault are believed to impact women and men differently across various life stages.

The current research conducted a survey involving 750 participants from three key cities in Israel's metropolitan areas. This survey seeks to understand nuances in pedestrian safety perceptions. By assessing how these perceptions differ between men and women at different points in their life journey and across various urban contexts, the study provides valuable insights. These findings are aimed at aiding urban planners and decision-makers in enhancing safety and inclusivity in urban environments.

Yashvant Premchand (p), Henri De Groot, Thomas De Graaff, Eric Koomen

Orit Rotem-mindali

Land subsidence is a human-induced physical process gaining increased attention in the Netherlands. Increasing droughts and current water management practices exacerbate the physical processes that cause land subsidence. This results in damage to houses yielding high costs to be covered by homeowners themselves. In this research, we investigate part of the financial impact by looking at the effect on house prices in the Green Heart region in the Netherlands. We use yearly land subsidence rates and 96,000 housing transactions over the period 2000—2020 to estimate the financial impact by using a hedonic pricing model and add neighborhood fixed effects to control for local unobserved heterogeneity. Our results show an average decline in prices of around 2% when houses are subject to land subsidence. We also find that the effects vary by housing type and construction year, with detached houses and houses constructed before 1970 experiencing stronger declines. The average decline in house prices is lower than the average cost of land subsidence damage per affected house. Therefore, potential damage is not fully capitalized in house prices indicating a lack of awareness among homeowners. These results provide insight to steer the public debate concerning water management, insurability, and governmental interventions to mitigate and adapt to land subsidence effects.

Andrea Pronti, Edoardo Baldoni (p), Dolores Rey-Vicario, Dimitrios Kremmydas, Pascal Tillie

Yashvant Premchand

Regional agricultural sectors are particularly vulnerable to the impacts of drought events, resulting in significant economic losses in Europe each year. Therefore, it is essential to have a thorough understanding of how drought affects crop productivity in order to make informed decisions and plans. We obtained data on crop yields and characteristics of regional farming systems from the Farm Accountancy Data Network (FADN) and linked this information with the Combined Drought Indicator (CDI) produced by the European Drought Observatory (EDO) using crop masks. This allowed us to analyse the yield effects of drought on wheat and maize at a regional level across the EU from 2013 to 2021. Our analysis reveals that severe drought led to an average reduction of around 0.5% in wheat yield per additional 10-day of drought in the period. Additionally, we found that severe droughts particularly impact crop yields during the last period of the cropping season. In the case of maize, we observed that the estimated reduction in yields due to drought was limited to drought of medium severity, with an estimated decrease of between 0.16% and 0.19% of average regional maize yields per additional 10-day of drought. Similarly, our analysis indicated that the last period of analysis had the most significant effect on maize yields. The results of this paper have implications for future policy development, as the assessment of potential drought effects on these two main crops could guide the creation of policies to strengthen the resilience of agricultural regions across the EU. This study's methodology could also be extended to other agricultural activities in order to create thorough climate change scenarios that account for the direct and indirect effects of drought, in the agricultural sector and in the wider economy, through simulation tools.