EGU 2012

In 2011 I attended the European Geophysical Union (EGU) in Vienna for the first time as a new PhD student. In all of the presentation and poster sessions for natural hazards, only a handful dealt with multiple natural hazards. And of this handful, only a few discussed or mentioned the cascading or linked effect of multiple hazards.

Kevin Fleming as manager of the MATRIX project outlaid a plan to research many issues associated with multi-hazards. This included assessing their relationships, their cascading effects and the effect of temporal scale on vulnerability in successive hazard events.

Melanie Kappes was also in attendance to present the findings of her PhD on multiple hazards affecting mountain environments.

This year at the EGU, there was a whole session devoted to ‘Multi-type hazard and risk assessment’. It shows a shift in some researchers’ thinking towards a more holistic and less isolated way of dealing with natural hazards. I was very pleased to see it producing interesting presentations and posters, and also well attended. Of particular note in the session, was Joel Gill’s presentation on ‘Reviewing and visualising interaction relationships for natural hazards’. His presentation outlined a clear way of showing the relationships between hazards, representing how they affect the likelihood and predictability of the secondary hazard and how well these relationships are understood in the literature. I look forward to his work being published as I feel it will provide a key reference in any research studying linked and cascading hazards.

However, as I discussed with some of the attendees and presenters there at the time, there were very few presentations which dealt with the interconnectedness of hazards. Every presentation in the session dealt with multiple hazards; however, very few explored the connections and cascading effects of multiple hazards. It was postulated that perhaps a more consistent way of separating these research areas was needed in the literature.

It is encouraging that multiple hazard research has become more popular and we do need more research into this area. but in this blog I will now make a differentiation between multiple hazard research (where more than one hazard is studied, but each is considered mostly separately) and what I will refer to as multi-hazard research (where connections, relationships and cascading effects between hazards are the main focus). When I come to publish my research, I will make this distinction clear, and perhaps over time with more people researching multi-hazards, the difference between them and multiple hazards will become clearer and more established.