Interacting UK Hazards - Impacts and Origins PhD

Loughborough University has recently advertised for a PhD opportunity: "Interacting UK Hazards - Impacts and Origins". It's great to see the field and funding is starting to get on board with multiple and interacting natural hazards!


Interacting UK Hazards – Impacts and Origins

Dr John Hillier, Geography, Loughborough
Dr Gregor Leckebusch, School GEES, Birmingham
Dr Kate Royse, British Geological Survey

Summary:
An excellent, inquisitive and highly-numerate student is sought to combine novel and industry-based GIS methods (i.e., catastrophe modelling) to understand the origins and impacts of interacting hazards as they afflict the UK.

Background:
The UK is affected by several natural hazards (e.g., floods in 2007). These are currently considered independently, but they could interact. A pilot study by the supervisors, using a novel way of examining past data, has robustly shown that interactions can alter likely ‘worst case’ losses by ~£50 million. This is of immediate interest to insurance companies and with much potential to contribute to policy making about the resilience of the UK as climate changes.

Objectives & Methodology:
A core of the work is low risk, building directly upon the pilot study, but scope exists for a student to innovate and excel. A key objective is to understand the origin of the interaction between shrink-swell subsidence losses for clay soils and other risks. This will be done by relating loss data (Zurich Insurance) to recorded weather patterns and developing published work linking subsidence and climate using British Geological Survey (BGS) data (e.g., GeoSure). The strength of interaction between physical processes required to explain the observed impacts will be quantified by generating catastrophe models [e.g., Donat & Leckebusch, 2011; Royse & Hillier In Press] (new QuickCat code). ‘Catastrophe modelling’ is relatively little used in academia, giving potential for exciting developments, and the last stage of this project is a new use for the technique.

Employability:
A secondment to Zurich Insurance Plc. (3-6 months) has been negotiated, and engagement with the BGS is anticipated. Catastrophe modelling underpins all financial risk assessment, and is becoming critical in Disaster Risk Reduction and humanitarian efforts, ideally placing the student for a range of careers. Training will include fieldwork, integrated modelling, GIS, and relevant programming giving the student skills identified as ‘most wanted’ for environmental jobs; ‘modelling’, ‘multi-disciplinarity’, ‘risk and uncertainty’.

Multi-Hazards Summer School 2014

The Association of Pacific Rim Universities are hosting a Multi-Hazards Summer School in July 2014 at Tohoku University (date to be announced).

The Multi-Hazards Summer School objectives are to:

• Increase knowledge of the Hyogo Framework for Action (168 countries adopted at the UN World Conference on Disaster Reduction in 2005) and DRR initiatives in Japan; 
• Share lessons and experiences on effective disaster preparedness from the Great East Japan Earthquake and Tsunami; 
• Discuss the roles of universities/research institutes in DRR and their challenges; and
• Identify collaborative synergies among APRU universities in DRR and develop strategies to harness these.

Program

The Multi-HazardsSummer School consists of a 2-day seminar and a site visit to the affected area impacted by the Great Eastern Japan Earthquake and Tsunami.

Summer School topics will include:

• Hyogo Framework for Action ~ International framework for DRR ~ 
• DRR initiatives and history in Japan 
• Lessons-learnt from the Great East Japan Earthquake and Tsunami
• Campus safety 
• Good practices of DRR initiatives by academia
• Future roles of academia in DRR

EGU 2014: Multi-type hazard and risk assessment: Concepts and methodologies

Details of the 2014 EGU multi-type hazard and risk session for you all. Really disappointed I won't be able to attend this year. Once again, Kevin Fleming from the MATRIX project convening the session. Really nice to see this topic being pushed forward. Hope there are some good and relevant presentations for 2014!







NH9.9 Multi-type hazard and risk assessment: Concepts and methodologies

Convener: Kevin Fleming
Co-Conveners: Alexander Garcia-Aristizabal , Nadejda Komendantova

Losses arising from natural hazards are increasing worldwide, and are expected
to continue to do so, often as a result of the increased  exposure and vulnerability
of human society.  Scientists, engineers,  regional and local planners, civil
protection authorities and disaster  managers usually treat natural and
anthropogenic hazards and risks  individually; however, such a framework leads
to the neglect of the  frequent spatial and temporal relationships that exist between
hazards  and their associated risks.  This potentially leads to the situation where
simply summing the individual risks may result in an  underestimation of their true
impact, while identifying the different  types of risk, i.e., direct versus indirect, and
tangible versus  intangible, remains a challenge.  There is therefore an
increasing  realisation that a multi-hazard and risk framework is necessary if 
one is to effectively assess the consequences of natural and  anthropogenic
disasters, and to optimise the available resources for  mitigating against such
events.  Such a framework would need to consider  the various interactions
between different hazard types, and hazards  and risks, while also considering
the different loss types in order to  gain a complete view of how disasters impact
upon the broader society.

This session aims at presenting the latest developments in the area of  multi-type
hazard and risk assessment. The issues of particular concern  are cascade effects,
including the interactions between natural and  NaTech events, uncertainty
propagation and temporal dependency, which  requires examining short-term
sequences where hazards occur almost  simultaneously or are triggered by one
another, to longer-term scenarios  that may cover several months or years.  Case
studies where a  multi-type framework has been applied (for better or for worse) or
could  have been beneficially applied are also of interest.

Landslide scenarios for a large Seattle earthquake: Blog Post Share

A quick share to let you know of a recent post on the Institute of Hazard, Risk and Resilience Blog about an electronically released paper on landslide scenarios for a large Seattle earthquake. Post here, written by Dave Petley reviews the paper. For access to the paper, click here.

This paper is very close to my research in simulating earthquake-triggered landslide occurrences and the potential damages from them.

9th Multi-Hazards Symposium 2013

The APRU symposium series on Multi-Hazards around the Pacific Rim is having its ninth symposium from 28 to 29 October 2013 at National Taiwan University in Chinese Taipei.

Unfortunately, I have only just become aware of this event so will not be attending. It is unlikely I would have had time at this stage of my PhD to travel there to present in any case.

The 9th APRU symposium is hosted by the Center for Weather Climate and Disaster Research (WCDR) at National Taiwan University. For general information, please refer to the website.

The 9th APRU symposium aims to convene scholars and experts from countries around the Pacific Rim. The inter-disciplinary knowledge on multi-hazard researches can be exchanged and shared through APRU collaboration. The symposium will focus on related topics of multi-hazards induced by extreme weather, earthquake, volcanic activity and haze pollution. Other issues are also included such as advanced monitoring and forecasting techniques, risk assessment, disaster health and emergency management, as well as education on disaster reduction.


Topics:

1.Multi-hazards induced by extreme weather; Multi-hazards induced by earthquake; Multi-hazards induced by volcanic activity; Air pollution and haze related issue

2.Disaster risk assessment and impact analysis; Advanced research on monitoring, sensing, nowcasting and forecasting

3.Disaster management and education; Post-disaster recovery and reconstruction; Disaster health and emergency management

Foresight Review Case Study: Global Multiple Hazard and Risk Mapping

The Foresight Review commissioned in 2012 has a section (co-written by me) on multiple hazard and risk mapping. I forgot to post something about it at the time. Click on the links below for access to the documents.

Reducing Risks of Future Disasters: Priorities for Decision Makers.

Evidence base document for download: State-of-the-Art in Risk Mapping
CASE STUDY: Global Multiple Hazard and Risk mapping (p49)
Authors: Mirianna E.A. Budimir, Peter M. Atkinson and Hugh G. Lewis


A quote from the document for you all:

"Multi-hazard risk assessment should also take into consideration the interaction between multiple hazards affecting an area. Natural hazards act in a natural system and as such are complex and affect each other. The cascading effects of natural hazards and their impact on resultant risk is an important area of research which has received little attention to date."

Thoughts on NERC PURE Associates Brokerage Workshop

On 10th September I attended the NERC PURE Associates brokerage workshop in Oxford, aimed at bringing together researchers and practitioners to collaborate for a grant. The call aims “to fund scientists to work with business, policy-makers and NGOs to apply their knowledge and skills to improve assessments of natural hazard risk and enhance decision-making”, by funding projects of between three to six months’ duration that will transfer existing knowledge, models and expertise into business, policy or NGOs.

NERC stipulated the aim of the projects should be either:

a. To produce robust risk assessments based upon single or multiple natural hazards that integrate measures or models of exposure and vulnerability; this will enable decision-makers to take action to manage risk;

b. To develop tools to support decision-making under environmental uncertainty.

NERC would particularly encourage applications for projects which:

• develop robust assessments of risk to infrastructure, business operations and supply chains from natural hazards, including extreme weather;


• develop risk models around multi-hazard assessments;


• develop tools to visualise and communicate risk and uncertainty;


• develop tools to inform planning for long-term investment such as infrastructure or business interruption, including risks to the supply chain;


• develop tools to help emergency planning and responses, and build community resilience through humanitarian and development organisations;


• adapt tools developed in other application areas for managing risk and uncertainty to natural hazards.

The day was incredibly useful. I made lots of contacts and met people doing really interesting research, with great ideas for projects. Personally, these types of events always get me re-excited about research and reminds me why I am in this field of research. A few things occurred during the day that really surprised or struck me and I thought I would share them on this blog.

After being informed three years ago that multi-hazard risk assessment is already normal practice for catastrophe modelling and risk assessment in the industry (which deflated me a little/lot), I was surprised to discover that is not entirely true. Some Cat Models only account for the major hazards affecting a region and landslide hazards are often entirely missing altogether. Perhaps I was a little naive all those years ago to take the word of one practitioner as gospel. But I had no way of checking. Competitive businesses do not put their information online as open source for all to see. This is entirely natural as they do not want other competitors stealing their methods, but holds back the development of the field of research.

The poor-showing of NGOs at the event surprised me. Although it was emphasised the purpose of the workshop was to get practitioners networking with academics, when the attendee list was skimmed, there were very few of those end users and NGOs - the majority of those there were academics. One of the questions from the research grant call was 'What are the biggest problems facing NGOs?'. With very few there from an NGO, there was noone to answer the question. Perhaps my expectations of the number of NGOs to be there was a little high though. The gap between NGOs and academics is a problem that I keep seeing crop up just in the last few years of my PhD research. There is a realisation that NGOs and end-users need to be involved in research and collaborate or help guide the research questions of academics, but at the end of the day the gap is still pretty big between them. This call was specifically aimed at trying to bridge that gap. I hope that some collaborations come out as a result of the call.

Bridging gaps between disciplines and communicating research is supposed to be encouraged, and yet specialism is rewarded and prized at Universities. This is a huge conflict of priorities. During the workshop, the idea od a 'translator' was raised - someone who understands the science, empathises with the needs of the end-users, and is able to speak both languages and act as a broker. They are essential and valued in communicating the information between scientists and end-users. But in academia they are rarely recognised or respected - publications in academic journals appears to be the end goal. Which on the one hand is right and on the other is frustrating. Perhaps we need a new discipline in academia specifically aimed at this communication, and Geography is the department that this would really work.

Unfortunately, there is still a lack of multi-hazard research. At the workshop, there were only a few proposals talked about that were aimed at this area. And it didn't pop up at all in the discussion sessions. Academics are encouraged to be specialists, and getting round this with inter-disciplinary teams and research projects could help, but often raises more difficulties.

There were a few proposals that were aimed at tackling the multi-hazard issues, and this was encouraging. The field is obviously still new and developing, and it is slowly gathering evidence, models and information behind it. I hope this continues and I look forward to following these developments.

Dynamics and Impacts of Interacting Natural Hazards Workshop Report

A report documenting the First Dynamics and Impacts of Interacting Natural Hazards Workshop Report is now available online.

The First Workshop on the Dynamics and Impact of Interacting Natural Hazards was held at University College London on 14 February 2013.  The one day workshop was attended by 20 participants from across academia (with representatives from six universities in the UK and Europe), industry and the public sector, and was hosted by the Aon Benfield UCL Hazard Centre (ABUHC).  The event was a collaborative effort between three PhD students – myself, Melanie Duncan and Joel Gill – who are currently working in the field of interacting multi-hazards. 

The short report summarises the presentations and discussions that took place and outlines the actions that will be taken forward.  The original workshop agenda and the participants at the workshop are included in the Appendices.

Three main discussion and presentation sessions took place on the day:

Session 1: Defining and introducing multi-hazard and multi-hazard interactions

Session 2: Methods to identify, model and constrain multi-hazard interactions

Session 3: Practical applications and mitigation strategies

The workshop provided a unique opportunity for networking with researchers and practitioners with an interest in interacting hazards – participants discussed potential collaborations as well as methods for improving the dissemination of their research. 

Dynamics and Impact of Interacting Hazards Workshop

THE DYNAMICS AND IMPACT OF INTERACTING HAZARDS WORKSHOP

Co-organized between UCL, KCL, and Southampton University

London, UK (14 February 2013)

On 14 February 2013, the First Dynamics and Impact of Interacting Hazards Workshop was convened as a collaborative effort between three PhD students – Mirianna Budimir (University of Southampton), Melanie Duncan (University College London), and Joel Gill (King's College London). The workshop, hosted this year by the UCL Aon Benfield Hazard Centre, aimed to explore current research into interacting hazards and future collaborative opportunities, as well as emphasising the importance of hazard interactions.

This one day workshop was attended by 20 participants from academia, industry and the public sector, with representatives from six universities in the UK and Europe. Short presentations were delivered on themes including defining a multi-hazard approach, tools and methodologies to constrain hazard interactions, and the effective integration of hazard interaction knowledge into hazard assessments.

Interspersed between these presentations, a large amount of time was given for small (often very animated) group discussions, with each smaller group reporting back to the larger set of participants. Discussions were wide ranging, sharing ideas about different types of evidence for interacting hazards, balancing the complexities of interacting hazards research with the needs of stakeholders, and the importance of assessing uncertainty.

  

 

The workshop highlighted the importance of interacting hazards research, as well as the challenges of retaining focus within such a broad topic. It also verified the importance of ensuring a standard terminology is developed and used within the emerging field of multi-hazard research. The convenors will be publishing a full workshop report on the interacting hazards website (www.interactinghazards.com), and hope to organise further workshops in the future.