The author highlights the risks Mexico City has historically faced with regards to water-related hazards, including flooding and water scarcity, and how various urban transformations have exacerbated the city’s exposure to such risks. She proceeds to describe the ways in which environmental, social and economic vulnerabilities of the population, infrastructure and systems intersect with such risks, the more vulnerable populations have less propensity to adaptive capacity. She argues that climate change is likely to aggravate vulnerabilities, and the city needs to develop a long term disaster risk reduction framework which would i) develop capacities to anticipate and respond to hazards; ii) address underlying processes of socio-environmental deterioration that reduce the city’s ability to reduce the impacts of hazards impacts; and, iii) engage with the socioeconomic and institutional factors driving vulnerabilities which affect adaptive capacities.