Urban planning is a multidisciplinary study area concentrated on designing urban spaces in an integrated mode, considering urban mobility, work and income generation, habitation spaces, and recreation. It creates and applies policies for land use and exploration of natural resources to support the expansion of cities and ensure economic, social, and environmental sustainability, and supplies essential services, such as electricity. In this way, guaranteeing the sustainable development of cities demands adequate urban planning[38, 39].
Urban planning, a pressing need, not only ensures the sustainable construction of new cities but also accompanies the expansion and administration of existing ones. It involves creating and implementing strategies to achieve the 169 goals established in the SDGs[3, 40]. These strategies affirm the necessity of meeting these goals sustainably, ensuring the reduction or neutralization of emissions and promoting the use of natural resources to guide sustainable development. This approach has an urgent role in mitigating global warming and, consequently, the risks of related disasters[10, 35].
Most greenhouse gas emissions come from human activity, leaving urban planning responsible for mitigating those emissions or adopting nature-based solutions to neutralize environmental consequences[11]. At the same time, confronted with the climate emergency induced by the increased risk of disasters associated with extreme weather events, urban planning must develop and execute actions that ensure climate adaptation and increase the resilience of cities to minimize the risks and impacts of disasters[33].
While many cities share common characteristics, each one has individual geographical, social, and environmental characteristics, which demand the creation of region-specific disaster risk reduction policies. The Sendai Framework for Disaster Risk Reduction is a comprehensive guide to drive the development of policies for creating resilient cities[8]. This guide establishes that the starting point to create an efficient policy must be identifying risk areas. This identification must go beyond the mapping of physical risk, also considering socio-environmental, socioeconomic, and sociocultural vulnerabilities that may increase the damage to a vulnerable community in the event of disasters, causing delays or making it impossible for vulnerable groups to recover after disasters[41].
Another major challenge for urban planning is guiding the rapid population increase in cities. The global population duplicated in less than 50 years, from 4.01 billion people in 1975 to more than 8 billion in 2023. This number is projected to grow in the coming years, reaching more than 9 billion inhabitants by 2050, with most of that population living in urban areas[42]. Handling this population growth demands urban planning to create policies to expand urban areas without increasing risks and inequalities[43].
This urban growth occurs along with the migratory process of people from rural to urban areas, concentrated in large metropolises, called urbanization. In 2024, 55% of the world’s population was concentrated in urban areas, and this percentage is estimated to reach 68% by 2050[42]. This population expansion in cities demands planning to ensure there is no urban overload, meeting the needs of mobility, housing, food, electricity, health, education, and other essential services while ensuring urban security and resilience[44].
This population increase also requires changes in land use to develop new urban areas and extend existing ones. In 2022, these changes were responsible for the emission of 4.31 billion tons of CO2[45]. In addition to guiding changes in land use in a sustainable mode and reducing or neutralizing emissions, urban planning must guarantee that houses are not built in risk areas, such as slopes and floodplains of rivers, and that land use does not aggravate soil waterproofing, making rainwater drainage difficult or impossible. These are fundamental actions to reduce disaster risks in urban planning[46].
Like cities, urban planning is a complex system with interconnected variables. Understanding the urban planning of a city requires a multidisciplinary methodological approach, which allows, within this context, to comprehend the expansion of cities, land use impacts, emission mitigation, and climate resilience and adaptation[14, 15]. Universities and research institutions are vital stakeholders in urban planning, acting in the creation and application of scientific approaches for mapping risk areas, developing technologies to reduce global warming through the reduction and neutralization of greenhouse gas emissions[18].
Although urban planning has frameworks to guide disaster risk reduction, the high number of disasters reported in 2023 indicates that climate adaptation is different from the reality of many cities[26]. This demonstrates that urban planning still faces major challenges in creating and implementing these strategies. Exploring the contributions and motivations of the academy for disaster risk reduction provides insight into the potential of urban planning to minimize risks, which is the main objective of this work.