Urbano Fra Paleo is an expert in disaster risk governance. In particular, he studies the institutional framework and solutions adopted for risk reduction through public policies, as well as the mode of hazard governance adopted by different societies to manage the hazards they have prioritised.

Urbano is a member of the European Science & Technology Advisory Group of the United Nations Office for Disaster Risk Reduction (UNDRR). He is also co-chair of the Task Force on Measuring Hazardous Events of the United Nations Economic Commission for Europe (UNECE).

He is Professor (rtrd) at the University of Extremadura, and has been Professor at the University of Santiago de Compostela, Visiting Professor at the United Nations-mandated University for Peace (Costa Rica), and Research Associate at The Environment Institute, University of Denver . He has also been a Fellow of the American Geographical Society.

Among other works, he has published Building Safer Communities. Risk Governance, Spatial Planning and responses to natural hazards (2009), Natural hazards in Galicia (2010), and Risk Governance, The Articulation of Hazard, Politics and Ecology (2015). He has recently published Family Farms and the Conservation of Agrobiodiversity in Cuba Food Security and Nature (2023) together with Leonor Castiñeiras.

Urbano Fra has contributed to the development of the Hazard Information Profiles (HIPs), under the leadership of UNDRR and the International Science Council.