Community-driven natural hazard and physical vulnerability assessment in a disaster-prone urban neighborhood

Effectively reducing the risk of disasters in urban neighbourhoods is a key policy priority, which is becoming more pressing due to climate change. However, disaster risk reduction and climate adaptation efforts are often hampered by data gaps regarding the physical vulnerability and local impacts of hazards at the neighbourhood level. These gaps are particularly pronounced for informal settlements and marginalized communities of cities in the Global South, which are frequently invisible in official hazard and risk maps. Community-generated data and participatory methods are promising approaches to address these gaps, but there is a lack of guidelines and empirical examples of effective integration of communities into vulnerability assessment. This study presents the co-production of a physical vulnerability assessment framework, between academia, practitioners, and community researchers, using an iterative and easily replicable methodology. Working with community researchers from the self-constructed community El Pacífico in Medellín (Colombia), we developed a hazard perception exercise based on vulnerability indicators and produced hazard perception and physical vulnerability usable maps. We show how this work was able to refine the spatial scale of the hazard maps available for the neighbourhood, going beyond the city planning tools and enabling a building-scale vulnerability assessment that is valuable not only to support community decision-making and planning but also to advocate for public interventions towards reducing disaster risks.