Social impact of natural hazards

“My teacher is a volcanologist”- Valeria Cigala tells us about her journey from academia to middle school teaching

Silvia De Angeli July 24, 2023

Valeria introduces minerals and the Mohs scale to her students, as part of her evaluation as a middle school teacher, while her tutor is holding the box with the mineral samples.

Valeria Cigala (Ph.D.) is a geoscientist by education and an expert in explosive volcanism and related hazards. She has been the Early Career Scientists Representative for the Natural Hazards Division of EGU from 2019 to 2022 and Editor-in-chief of our blog. Valeria is currently employed as a maths and science teacher at the middle school level in Italy. In this inspiring interview, she is sharing ...[Read More]

The 2023 Carnival disaster in São Paulo: an all time record for rainfall in Brazil

Paulo Hader May 22, 2023

Photo credit: Image by Mati Mango from Pexels (Pexels licence)

In February 2023, Brazil experienced its largest rainfall event on record, which devastated the northern coast of the state of São Paulo. This event caused landslides, floods, and numerous fatalities, making it even more tragic than previous disasters in the region, which already have been elaborated on in another blog post. The situation highlights the urgent need for effective emergency manageme ...[Read More]

Connecting the dots: the importance of recognising multi-hazard events in disaster reporting

Sophie Buijs and Marleen de Ruiter March 27, 2023

A photo reporter and a cameraman broadcasting during Hurricane Sandy, Jersey City, New Jersey (USA), 29 October 2012. Photo credit: Wally Gobetz, available at https://www.flickr.com/photos/wallyg/8153742838 under Creative Commons license (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/2.0/)

In the past year, the world has witnessed many severe disasters caused by multiple hazards whose impacts overlapped in time and space. February this year, two severe earthquakes hit Syria and Turkey shortly after each other, followed by two more powerful earthquakes and over a hundred aftershocks in subsequent weeks [1,2]. The disaster caused over 48 thousand fatalities, and many people are still ...[Read More]

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]