Natural hazard

If a resilient city had a face: it might look like Kagoshima

Hedieh Soltanpour August 4, 2025

A view of Mt. Sakurajima from the city of Kagoshima (Image credit: Hedieh Soltanpour, June 2025)

As natural hazard scientists, we often emphasise the concept of exposure – how much people, infrastructure, and ecosystems are in harm’s way when close to natural hazard sources (e.g., floodplains, volcanoes, or fault lines). The closer you are, the higher the risk. Therefore, one of the main goals in natural risk assessment is to reduce exposure whenever possible. We advocate for informed plannin ...[Read More]

How is earthquake-driven sea-level rise changing our coasts?

Navakanesh M Batmanathan July 14, 2025

Mangroves stand strong against rising sea levels to protect our shorelines (image credit: Anirban Mukhopadhyay, distributed via imaggeo.egu.eu)

Coastal regions have always been at risk from natural hazards, but now, there’s an added layer of complexity. Earthquakes, which cause the land to move up or down, can significantly affect sea levels, especially in regions already experiencing the effects of climate change. Earthquakes can alter coastlines in ways that we’re still trying to understand, and it’s clear that tectonically active areas ...[Read More]

The Blatten landslide in Switzerland

Christophe Lambiel June 11, 2025

View on the Blatten landslide from downstream, with the Lonza river finding its way through the landslide (03 June 2025) (Image credit: Christophe Lambiel)

In the morning of May 28, 2025, the picturesque Swiss alpine village of Blatten sat quiet and serene in the Lötschen Valley. Exceptionally quiet, in fact, as the village was evacuated on May 19th after a local Natural Hazards expert spotted a worrisome change in a local mountain looming about the village, the Kleines Nesthorn: it was collapsing faster. The Kleines Nesthorn is a 3,341-meter peak wi ...[Read More]

The Geography of Multi-Hazards: Exploring Landscapes Prone to Hazard Cascades

Hedieh Soltanpour March 10, 2025

Diverse geographical settings, highlighting areas where Earth processes have the potential to overlap in time and space: Coastal (Laguna Beach, USA) (Image credit: Hedieh Soltanpour)

Multi-hazards are “a selection of major hazards that a country faces, and specific contexts where hazards occur simultaneously, cascadingly, and accumulatively considering the interrelationships among them”, based on the UNSDRR definition [7]. Yet, this definition raises two key questions: Where are these specific contexts located, and what characteristics make them susceptible to intersecting haz ...[Read More]