Hiroshima's Disaster, Climate Crisis, and the Future of the Resilient City

Abstract

Hiroshima City's unprecedented extreme rain and multiple landslides of August 20 took over 70 lives and wrecked several districts. The disaster was big enough to stay in the international news cycle for a few days, in spite of a summer rife with epidemic Ebola as well as worsening economic, environmental, geopolitical and other crises. This article argues that Hiroshima merits a great deal more sustained attention, indeed that it should be deliberately made a turning point in studying climate change and urban resilience. Surveys of the disaster sites, together with other evidence, suggest that Hiroshima's calamity offers multiple warnings about the impacts of accelerating climate change. This has led to a significant flow of human, fiscal and material resources, within Japan, that could be matched and coordinated with urban-resilience programmes in the US and elsewhere.