Recent Developments in the Field of Risk and Crisis Management towards Realization of the Sustainable Development Goals

Dear Colleagues,

You are already well aware that in year 2000 the United Nations, as the only one universal international organization in the globe, in an agreement with 191 member states declared to commit their efforts towards realization of the Millennium Development Goals. The declaration identified the key challenges of the globalized world in the reality of XXI century. Then the eight declared goals embraced such topics as combat poverty, hunger, disease, environmental degradation, discrimination against women as well as decrease of child mortality and others. These goals had been aimed to be achieved in 2015. Although enormous effort world widely has been dedicated to this agenda, the declared goals have not been fully met. Realizing the value of the Millennium Development Goals process as well as the need for continuity of such a project after 2015, the UN decided to launch a new agenda. During the historic UN summit in 2015 the world leaders agreed on the Sustainable Development Goals agenda which came into force on the 1-st of January 2016 as a continuity process for Millennium Development Goals. In the new agenda there are 17 global goals formulated, scheduled to be realized up to 2030. This time the goals address global challenges we all still face, including those related to poverty, hunger, health, inequality, clean water and sanitation, energy affordability, economic growth, climate change, environmental degradation, sustainable cities and communities as well as peace and justice issues.

Achievement of the Sustainable Development Goals has to take into consideration the key hazards which could negatively influence their realization. The list of those hazards seems to be endless when we realize that dynamically changing world of XXI century, a side the old threats, brings the new ones which are mainly related to globalization processes e.g. climate change, cyber world, social radicalization and fundamentalism, decreasing power of states and others. The old and new hazards might work as a trigger for natural and man-made disasters, including regional or even global war. Such hazards have definitely a potential to slow down or even, in case of black scenarios, entirely disable realization of the ambitious and humanistic agenda for Sustainable Development Goals committed by the world in UN Resolution 70/1 in 2015.

Therefore, crisis and risk management research appears as an irreplaceable field of scientific exploration in order to build resilient societies and systems towards such hazards. World widely there are a lot of different approaches and methods explored and implemented which facilitate societies and systems to prevent, mitigate, prepare for as well as response to and recover from such major emergencies. Moreover, the biggest international organizations like UN and EU have been since years dedicating significant financial contributions to research programs aimed at exploring new ways of resilience building.

The brief argumentation presented above leads to a conclusion that there is a deep sense for scientific exploration of the common fields and relations existing between sustainable and resilient societies and systems on local, regional and finally global level.

In this frame, this Thematic Issue aims to propose a collection of worthy studies that combine the aforementioned concepts in the prism of the Sustainable Development Goals dealing with methodologies, research projects’ results, case studies and/or other surveys concerning:

• analyses and explanations of the latest developments in the field crisis and disaster management,
• risk assessment, risk management especially including risk reduction,
• civil protection and civil defence
• critical infrastructure protection,
• emergency management,
• new technologies testing and usage towards crisis/disaster management improvement,
• good practices and lesson-learnt in the field of international and interagency cooperation and coordination in case of a crisis and/or a disaster,
• evaluation processes and studies on crises, conflicts, disasters as well as readiness exercises,
• safety and security institutions and systems on local, reginal and global level.

Original papers related to the above topics and also dealing generally with methodologies, numerical and experimental investigations, case-studies addressing building retrofit are welcome.

Thank you for your contributions.

Dr. Tomasz Zwęgliński
Prof. Jerzy Wolanin
Prof. Bernard Wiśniewski
Guest Editors

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