Cost of natural hazards

Repression Without Resistance: Answering Natural Hazards Related Disasters

Joana Parente June 27, 2022

Extreme weather events

Answering disasters triggered by natural hazards is a profoundly political process; who can tell us about this is Isabelle Desportes with her study cases of Ethiopia (the 2016 drought), Myanmar (cyclone Komen in 2015) and Zimbabwe (the 2016/2019 drought). Today, I have the pleasure of interviewing Dr Isabelle Desportes, a researcher who approaches disaster risk governance from the angle of politic ...[Read More]

Define and assess drought, the herculean challenge!

Joana Parente November 29, 2021

The drying out of the soil in the wadis of the Dead Sea Valley. Credit: Stefan Schmitt (distributed via imaggeo.egu.eu)

The frequency and intensity of drought periods have increased since the 1950s over most land areas [1]. In fact, between 1998 and 2017, drought was the sixth natural hazard associated with disasters (4.8% of the total number of disasters) but the second in terms of the total number of affected people (33% of the total number of affected people), causing more than 21,000 deaths [2]. For example, in ...[Read More]

Floods in the Anthropocene: the good, the bad and the ugly

Giulia Roder March 22, 2021

Floods and people: Who shapes whom? Credits: Pixabay (free for commercial use, no attribution required)

The interplay between human societies and floods dates back to Old World civilizations. Floodplains have provided the potential for prosperous agriculture and for the development of organised communities and urban cultures. Contextually, flood events have caused millions of fatalities and invaluable economic losses throughout history. Over the past decades, human activities have increasingly alter ...[Read More]

2020: The escalation of extreme rainfall events in Brazil

Paulo Hader February 22, 2021

Figure 1. A localized typical summer rainfall near the Serra do Mar in the region of Baixada Santista. Photo credit: Marcelo Fischer Gramani, with permission.

In summer 2020, extreme rainfall events dumped up to 320 mm of rain in a single day in the Baixada Santista metropolitan region, São Paulo state, breaking Brazil’s record for the biggest rainfall in a single event and demonstrating one of the greatest threats of climate change. The damage caused by the associated landslides led to dozens of fatalities and hundreds of homeless people, as well ...[Read More]