Spatiotemporal Modelling and Assessment of Water-related Multi-hazards

About this Research Topic

Background

Extreme weather and climate-driven disasters from intensified natural hazards have become the “new normal” in recent years. Climate change consequences and rapid urbanization further exacerbate disaster risks that encompass hazard, exposure and vulnerability of exposed people and infrastructure. Hazard drivers often do not occur in isolation so that single hazard assessments can underestimate associated hazard risks. Credible risk and impact assessments require consideration of the interacting nature of multi-hazard and cascading events in space and time. The severity of multi-hazard weather and climate events does not necessarily determine their impact; the exposure and vulnerability of assets and people exacerbate the overall risk. Further, as inter-related hazard drivers interact, their spatiotemporal scales of risk can change with time, resulting in non-linear relationships with impacts. Current understanding of complex interactions among different hazard drivers and establishing possible control measures remain poorly conceptualized.

This research topic collection invites studies on understanding spatiotemporal trends in multi-hazard weather and climate events, hazard risk assessments, and associated impacts the food-energy-water nexus at various spatial and temporal scales. We encourage submissions from a wide range of water-related multi-hazard and extreme weather and climate hazard events such as heatwaves and droughts and associated water stress and energy vulnerability, heavy precipitation-induced landslides and flash floods, pluvial, fluvial, and coastal floods, regional sea-level rise and land subsidence, storm surges, and cyclones. We invite review articles, new concepts, methodologies, and policy recommendations to increase community resilience, such as developing loss functions and damage estimation models, including but not limited to the following areas:

• New mathematical innovations or statistical frameworks for assessing multi-hazard and compound hazards and associated socio-economic vulnerability, uncertainty quantification associated with future projections.
• Physics-informed machine learning approaches for hazard assessment.
• Case studies and application of the novel methods linked to hazard mapping, developing damage models and loss function estimations.
• Development of new datasets and tools related to multi-hazard drivers.
• Observational, diagnostic, and numerical modelling.
• Paleoclimatic reconstruction in assessing multi-hazard events.
• Exploration of multi-hazard chain in uncharted and ungauged sites.
• Formulation of Multi-hazard risk framework, adaptation strategies and policy recommendations to mitigate impacts under changing climate and urban expansion.

Keywords: compound events, Multi-hazards, climate extremes, water security, risk, Societal resilence

Important note: All contributions to this Research Topic must be within the scope of the section and journal to which they are submitted, as defined in their mission statements. Frontiers reserves the right to guide an out-of-scope manuscript to a more suitable section or journal at any stage of peer review.

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