Disaster risk and clean technology transfer facing climate change: a theoretical approach towards sustainability and safety in middle-size Latin-America cities

Abstract

Disasters are not natural, they are problems unsolved by global development. Associated to disasters, vulnerability is characterized by factors like physical exposure, social fragility and lack of resilience. As part of an on-going research, our work shows a theoretical approach for analyzing the Disaster Risk and Clean Technology Transfer, looking for sustainable and safe middle-size cities in Latin America, facing the Climate Change. We expose that middle urban centers develop services functions, as well as big metropolis, nevertheless, its size allows to establish complementary management networks in case of natural disasters. If Climate change (CC) is a global threat, we look for its relationship with risk and disaster notions, as well as its effects in the cities of the mentioned region of the world. For the Disaster Risk Transfer (DRT), we review the evolution of retention and transfer as one of the four policies of the Integrated Risk Management (IRM), understood as a prevention phase. Risk cannot be transferred if it is not identified and reduced beforehand, because there is a link between an event’s occurrence before (exante) and after (ex-post). With Clean Technology Transfer (CTT), we explore this concept and the sustainable energy production in the above mentioned countries. We are looking for a definition of sustainable and safe Latin-America middle-size cities. We finish our document with some methodological guidelines for learning about the choice of a case study: the Mexican city Victoria de Durango.