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]
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]
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]
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]
In the afternoon of August 29, 2020, an intense supercell, which is a thunderstorm characterized by the presence of a deep, persistently rotating updraft, affected the province of Verona in the north of Italy (Figure 1). It was not the first event of this kind; several other events, including tornado episodes, had already occurred during summer 2020. Here the video of the downburst recorded during ...[Read More]
Which type of natural hazard is the most frequent? And which one causes the largest economic losses? Which populations are mainly affected? What are the necessary steps to reduce natural hazards’ impact? If you have ever wondered about any of these questions, you’d be interested to know that there is an institute answering all of them with a series of reports and ad hoc publications. We are ...[Read More]
