Toward a shared glossary for territorial risk management due to climate change

Abstract

The dynamics of demographic, industrial and economic growth that have occurred on a global scale since the industrial revolution have over time resulted in an increase in the frequency and intensity of hazards and in the levels of vulnerability of the exposed resources at local level. The need to counteract these phenomena has led to substantial international development of territorial risk management techniques with contributions from experts in different disciplines and which, to facilitate communication and exchange of information between professionals, has led to the construction of very similar methodological approaches and specialised glossaries.This article was produced to contribute to meeting the need, which emerged during an ERASMUS+ European research project called CARE - Empowering Climate Resilience, in which numerous European and Latin American universities took part, to overcome the existing terminological differences between the different schools of thought in managing risk due to climate change, a European one, mainly oriented to spatial planning, and a Latin-American one, mainly based on social science. This contribution consists of proposing a set of clear and consistent definitions of the main words used for the territorial risk management due to climate change. As this glossary refers to the management of risks due to climate change, it has mainly been developed on the basis of the definitions indicated by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).