37th Annual Natural Hazards Research and Applications Workshop

I have recently returned from the 37^th Annual Natural Hazards Research and Applications Workshop in Broomfield, Colorado, organised by the Natural Hazards Centre, Boulder. I presented a poster on my recent research into ‘Global Cascading Hazard Casualty Modelling: Earthquake-Triggered Landslides’. I hope to write up my research soon and get it published and will update here with any further news.

There were no sessions on cascading or linked hazards specifically, but I would like to share some of my impressions of the main messages to come from the workshop.

1.       The workshop was mainly from a more human geography/social science standpoint, so one of the key messages was: it’s all about the people. Science is definitely necessary, but at the end of the day, can only get us so far because it is where hazards interact with humans that disasters are formed. The decisions people on the ground make (whether it is the local authorities, or the local communities or individuals) often are the key determinant as to whether an event becomes a disaster or whether people survive and progress. How prepared people are and their mental state often affects the outcome of a hazard event.

Therefore it is important to empower the people who are going to experience hazards to be able to take control and responsibility for themselves. By engaging with locals, developing a community spirit with strong leaders, people have a better chance of survival and also potential to improve after an event, during reconstruction.

2.       There was also a call for more holistic research and well-rounded individuals in disaster preparedness and response. The nature of research requires people to have a narrow focus in their repertoire. However, in practice, more people with a breadth and depth of knowledge are needed.

 

3.       Communication between specialities and researchers are needed, as well as between researchers and practitioners.  We need to learn from each other. Researchers need to communicate their results to the practitioners, and practitioners need to communicate to the researchers what they need to be investigated.

Overall the workshop was incredibly informative, dynamic and interesting. Emphasis was put onto discussions in the sessions and networking at lunch and break times. The people were friendly and open to discussion and sharing of knowledge. It has encouraged and reinforced my aim to work in this field in my future career (post-PhD) and provided a well-needed push at this half-way point in my PhD.

I wish I could attend next year’s workshop, but my PhD funding won’t stretch far enough. I will just have to put together a great conference next year with Joel Gill (King’s College London) and Melanie Duncan (UCL) on the topic of cascading hazards. Watch this space for further details….

Upcoming Conferences

Some upcoming conferences this year dealing with natural hazards are listed below. All descriptions of the conferences are taken directly from the website advertising the conference. Of particular note is the Beijing conference which will have a session dedicated to cascading hazards.

Annual Natural Hazards Research and Applications Workshop

Since 1975, the Natural Hazards Center has hosted the Annual Natural Hazards Research and Applications Workshop for 400 federal, state, and local emergency officials; representatives of nonprofit and humanitarian organizations; hazards researchers; disaster consultants; and others dedicated to alleviating the impacts of disasters.

37th Annual Natural Hazards Research and Application Workshop
Saturday, July 14 through Tuesday, July 17, 2012
Omni Interlocken Resort
Broomfield, Colorado

The International Research Committee on Disasters Researchers Meeting and the Natural Hazard Mitigation Association Practitioners Meeting will immediately follow the main Workshop from Tuesday, July 17 through Wednesday, July 18.

The Third Conference of the International Society for Integrated Disaster Risk Management (IDRiM Society)

Beijing Normal University (BNU) in Beijing, China, on Sept. 7-9, 2012. The theme of the conference is “From surprise to rationality: Managing unprecedented large-scale disasters”.

In recent years, there have been increasing number of large-scale disasters (LSDs) occurring around the world, among which there have been some of the worst cases ever in history, e.g. the “3.11” Tohoku earthquake in Japan. The fact of rising numbers of major natural disasters and increasing losses claimed despite of years of efforts devoted to natural disaster risk reduction has resulted in wide concern about the traditional approaches of coping with natural disasters. Particularly, the frequent arrival of large-scale disasters that exceed local coping capacity urges new paradigms of risk management. The 3rd Conference of the International Society for Integrated Disaster Risk Management aims to promote focused discussion on the Integrated Risk Governance issues for large-scale disasters. Researchers in the field of disaster risk research are invited to gather in Beijing from developed countries from North America, Europe and East Asia, and from developing countries from Asia, Africa and South America. They shall spend 3 days in intensive discussion on the scientific, technical, economic, financial, and educational issues regarding large-scale disasters. The ultimate purpose is to find new approaches to coping with natural disasters, further filling the gap between science and implementation, and enhancing collective decision-making.

 

8th International Conference on Risk Analysis and Hazard Mitigation

19 - 21 September, 2012

Island of Brac, Croatia

Risk Analysis 2012 is the eighth international conference on risk analysis and hazard mitigation. Covering a series of important topics of current research interest and with many practical applications, the conference is concerned with all aspects of risk analysis and hazard mitigation, associated with both natural and anthropogenic hazards.

International Conference on Hazards & Disasters 2012

20-21 September 2012

Negombo, Sri Lanka

The ICRD/ ICAS joint Conference  on Hazards & Disasters 2012 offers a valuable opportunity to network with colleagues from many countries who share the same goals. Scientists and experts in hazards and disaster risk management are invited to participate in this International Conference on Hazards & Disasters 2012.

Session themes for the conference cover a rich and diverse range of research topics. We hope these sessions will bring researchers from across the globe together to discuss broad questions of common interest and provide a platform to establish relationships with new colleagues. You will be enlightened with innovative ideas and solutions at Hazards & Disasters 2012 and take initiatives to forge better solutions to reduce future risks and threats of hazards.

Matrix of multi-hazards

A while ago I created a matrix table to get clear in my mind the links between hazards. The result is displayed below. The table should be read from left to right. The primary hazard is listed in the vertical far left column, while the secondary hazard it triggers is listed along the top horizontal row.

It is by no means a complete or definitive guide to multi-hazards, but is a useful tool for trying to visualise the connections. If anyone has any suggestions to alter the table, I would be glad to hear them.

	Earthquake	Volcano	Flood	Tsunami	Landslide	Avalanche	Lahar	Mudflow	Hurricane
Earthquake		Shaking = gaps for magma		Displacement of water	Shaking	Shaking
Volcano	Eruption force		Glacier burst	Displacement of water	Flank collapse	Eruption/ shaking of snow on top	Tephra (+ melting)	Tephra (+ melting)	Tephra (?)
Flood					Undercutting		Entrainment of material	Entrainment of material
Tsunami			Water onto land
Landslide		Pressure change on flank	Block and break of river/lake	Displacement of water				Provision of material
Avalanche			Damming/ burst and melting	Displacement of water			Provision of transport	Provision of transport
Lahar			Provision of liquid
Mudflow			Provision of liquid
Hurricane	Pressure changes (?)	Water into gaps into magma	Heavy precipitation		Saturation of slopes		Heavy precipitation	Heavy precipitation

At the EGU, Joel Gill presented a much more robust matrix of multi-hazards. He intends to publish the results by the end of the summer, so watch this space for updates...

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.

Cascading terms in the literature

The term 'cascading' hazards is used inconsistently in the literature, often in passing. It will be used in this blog to describe the phenomenon whereby one hazard triggers another, which triggers another and so on, so that the situation worsens. Cascading hazards are also referred to in the literature as the 'domino/avalanche effect', 'cascading failures', 'catastrophe/disaster chains', 'triggered events' or similar terms (Helbing and Kuhnert, 2003; Delmonaco et al, 2007).

Shi (2005) separates disaster chains into two types: simultaneous and serial chains:

• Simultaneous chains are when multiple hazards occur in a cluster, at the same time and space, causing several disasters concurrently (Shi, 2005).

• Serial chains or synergistic events are a succession of disaster events caused by a single hazard with the resultant disasters happening in turn (Shi, 2005; Marzocchi et al, 2009).

Delmonaco et al (2007) outline two ways of assessing cascading hazards.

The first is by examining an individual chain of events, where one event triggers another, and try to assess the probability values in order to create risk maps (Delmonaco et al, 2007). This approach is input data demanding and ‘the complexity of the hazard chains can be overwhelming’ (Delmonaco et al, 2007).

The second approach is to assess risk for coincidences of hazards, even without assuming a direct link among them (Delmonaco et al, 2007). This is a more ‘robust’ and less data demanding approach that can give a rough estimate of risk posed by cascading hazards (Delmonaco et al, 2007). However, it is questionable whether this ‘overlay’ approach actually conveys a realistic representation of cascading effects.

Why study cascading and linked multi-hazards?

At least one natural hazard affects approximately 19% of the world's landcover and affect over 50% of it's population (Dilley et al, 2005). These natural hazards often cause damage to human infrastructure, casualties, economic losses, homelessness, and many other detrimental effects. Hazard risk assessments currently exist to identify areas at risk from individual natural hazards. However, many areas of the world are at risk of more than one hazard type. According to the Hotspots report, over 790 million people are exposed to more than one natural hazard globally (Dilley et al, 2005).

Multi-hazard risk assessments (MHRA) are used to assess the risk from more than one hazard affecting an area. The approach used to assess risk from these individual hazards varies between countries and studies. Generally, the risk from individual hazards are assessed and the results summed to calculate the risk from multiple hazards. This is the simplest and least data demanding method of assessing the risk from multiple hazards. However, this approach does not account for the connections between hazards.

Hazards are not independent phenomena. They are natural processes, and as such are complex and affect each other. Often an initial hazard event will cause or trigger a subsequent natural hazard to occur. This is a cascading hazard event. The figure below demonstrates some of the existing links between natural hazards.

Cascading hazards are mentioned in the literature, but descriptions and explanations are rare. Perhaps due to the monodisciplinary of research, cascading hazards have not been investigated to great extent. Natural hazard literature tends to concentrate on specialist, isolated hazards or topics. Little research has been conducted on the broad topic of cascading hazards until recently. The importance of cascading hazard research has been highlighted in recent years because of multi-hazard events of international importance (e.g. Japan earthquake and triggered tsunami, March 2011).

Introduction to blog

I am a PhD student at Southampton University studying cascading and linked multi-hazards. This is a relatively new field of research which has recently received more attention. I set up this blog to work through my ideas related to this area of research and hopefully receive some feedback from others with similar interests or greater expertise. With it being such a new area of research, collaborating and exploring these ideas together could help us understand these phenomena better.