Spatial planning in the face of natural and technological disasters: a literature review

A growing concern about disasters triggered by natural phenomena and technological accidents is evident over the last decades. These disasters are increasingly common and severe nowadays, partly due to the impact of climate change, which is exacerbated by the continuing human pressure on the environment. Spatial planning is believed to play a key role in disaster prevention with discussions about the integration of risk analysis and management in spatial planning processes being discussed relevantly recently. Nevertheless, it is still inconsistent. This is a literature review paper about the integration of prevention and management of natural/technological disasters in spatial planning. The authors performed extensive research in scientific search engines, using relevant keywords in a combined way, for more targeted results. Following a bibliometric analysis of 382 documents/papers, some of the major findings are: the topic gained momentum after 2006, most of the literature examines topics of prevention combined with management, the most researched disaster is floods and disaster risk management is usually discussed in combination with urban planning. Only about 5% of the publications refer to maritime spatial planning and merely around 3% of the research is solely dedicated to technological disasters, indicating that these topics are suitable for future research.