Emergency response

COVID-19 and natural hazards: a complex multi-risk scenario

Silvia De Angeli January 16, 2023

Photo credit: Image by Hermann Kollinger from Pixabay (Pixabay licence).

COVID-19 has been a disruptive ‘tsunami’ that most countries were not prepared to handle. The pandemic has been representing a global slow-onset long-lasting disaster that has drastically challenged all emergency management systems worldwide. The pandemic slow-onset disaster has been characterized by a prolonged emergency phase with varying intensity levels, and a cyclic behavior, where the interp ...[Read More]

Natural Hazards 101: Forecasting and modelling

Gabriele Amato September 6, 2021

Photo credit, from top left to bottom right: Pamela Trisolino (via Imaggeo), Michiel Baatsen (via Imaggeo), Stefan Doerr (via Imaggeo), Dimitri Defrance (via Imaggeo), Katja Bigge (via Imaggeo), Babak Hejrani (via Imaggeo), Elias Sch (via Pixabay) and Dan Killam (via Imaggeo).

With the Natural Hazards 101 series, we mean to bring our readers closer to the terminology often used in the field of natural hazards, but that may not be so familiar. In the first episode of the series, we focused on the definition of hazard and natural hazard. We moved then to the concept of risk, which brought us to define exposure and vulnerability. Later on, we digested the disaster terminol ...[Read More]

Diagnosing drought in northeast Brazil

David W Walker and 3DDD research team May 3, 2021

A dam, an almost empty water reservoir and a small abandoned boat

Figure 1. An almost completely dry reservoir at Quixeramobim in the state of Ceará, northeast Brazil, during the 2012-2018 drought. Photo credit: Juliana Lima Oliveira (FUNCEME), with permission.

Worldwide, drought has put lives and livelihoods under serious threat. People are increasingly suffering from drought, but we often also aggravate drought ourselves. Fortunately, solutions to drought problems are mainly in our own hands as well. Drought is not just a water problem. It is a societal problem. Droughts: a local problem with global relevance In recent years, droughts seem to be ...[Read More]