Disaster Resilience Scorecard for Cities: Chemicals and Waste Management Addendum

Disaster Resilience Scorecard for Cities: Chemicals and Waste Management Addendum

Chemicals play a vital role in daily life and are essential for achieving societal goals and needs. When chemicals and waste, including everything from industrial feedstocks and specialty chemicals to fuels and various solid, liquid, or hazardous waste streams, are not managed properly, they can pose significant risks to human health and the environment. Beyond the direct risks that chemicals- and waste-related disasters post to human health and environment, disruptions in the chemicals and waste management can create cascading impacts for societies and local communities when disasters occur.

Building resilient cities requires integrating the environmentally sound management of chemicals and waste into disaster risk reduction and management strategies. Urban areas are hubs of industrial activity, transportation, and consumption, making them particularly vulnerable to chemical releases, waste-related disruptions, and secondary hazards triggered by disasters. Strengthening resilience therefore depends on close coordination between actors across the DRR sector and chemicals and waste lifecycle. This includes the entire range of actors involved in the life cycle of chemicals, including extraction, production, processing, distribution, consumption, and disposal, recycling and beneficial reuse of chemical and material products originating from industries and municipalities, and the broader economic, societal, and natural environments in which chemicals and waste management is embedded. They are those involved in science, technology, data, and innovation. Others include public and private quality and safety control organizations. Effective collaboration among these groups ensures early identification of risks, preparedness for chemical and waste emergencies, and rapid, well-coordinated responses that protect communities, critical infrastructure, and ecosystems when disasters occur.

The Addendum is structured in sections around the same Ten Essentials for Making Cities Resilient as other versions of the Disaster Resilience Scorecard for Cities. The Ten Essentials provide a holistic coverage of the many issues that affect resilience in the “system-of-systems”, which make up a city. This includes chemicals and waste production, supplies, transport and services. There are 26 indicators with a score of 0-5, where 5 is best practice.

This addendum is available in different file formats:

• The Accessible PDF version is made to allow universal access to the document.
• The excel tool allows you to provide interactive scoring, take note of the assessment rationale, and provide proof for verification. The excel tool can produce the pictograms showing the results of analysis at the end which are highly useful for planning and decision making. It complements the narrative provided in the PDF version.