Emerging Technology-Based Natural Disaster Prevention Infrastructure

Climate change, urbanisation, and environmental degradation are making natural catastrophes like earthquakes, floods, cyclones, wildfires, landslides, and heatwaves happen more often and with more force. Conventional disaster management strategies, predominantly centred on post-event reaction, are inadequate for mitigating escalating hazards. This chapter looks at how new technology can help develop infrastructure that can avert natural disasters in a smart, proactive, and strong way. It looks at how AI, the IoT remote sensing, big data analytics, digital twins, blockchain, and smart communication networks are changing how we assess catastrophe risk, how we set up early warning systems, how we make infrastructure more resilient, and how we get communities ready for disasters. The chapter also talks about problems with putting technology-driven disaster prevention frameworks into action, ethical issues, and where these frameworks should go in the future to enable development that is both sustainable and climate-resilient.