A Participatory Chatbot for Strengthening Urban Flood and Landslide Resilience: Integrating Community Awareness and Planning Decision Support

Urban communities are facing intensifying risks from floods and other disasters, creating a growing need to connect scientific knowledge with everyday community experience. The continuing increase in anthropogenic activities on the planet has intensified climate change, leading to a higher frequency and severity of natural hazard-related disasters. Digital technological advancements, including monitoring systems that integrate sensors and machine learning, are being implemented in disaster management practices, yielding beneficial outcomes, yet risk communication and preparedness mechanisms remain fragmented across institutions, limiting public literacy, regulatory compliance, and informed development decisions. This study presents a participatory, AI-driven WhatsApp-based chatbot designed to enhance urban adaptive capacity by translating institutional hazard knowledge into actionable, location-specific community guidance. The methodology is grounded in a hybrid architecture that combines a user-centred design approach, with a modular multi-agent system. Additionally, the architecture integrates a collection of modular agents: a language agent facilitating multilingual interaction, an API agent providing live weather updates, and a scheduler agent. Moreover, the system design is supported by measures for overall performance, including response speed, retrieval confidence, language detection accuracy, and system dependability. A full expert review will be undertaken for planning and engineering professionals to systematically assess the relevance, accuracy, understandability, and comprehensiveness of the responses from the user's perspective. For planners and developers, this chatbot supports risk-sensitive zoning interpretation and decision-making, contributing to improved regulatory adherence and safer land-use practices. For individuals, the chatbot provides fundamental disaster awareness, preparedness tips, relief information, and participatory reporting, thereby increasing awareness before and after the disasters. This study demonstrates how digital innovation can facilitate the operationalisation of Sustainable Development Goals, which directly address SDG 11 and 13—Sustainable Cities and Communities and Climate Action—and indirectly SDG 9 and 17—Industry, Innovation and Infrastructure and Partnerships for the Goals.