Assessments of flood risk, on global to local scales, are becoming more urgent with ongoing climate change and with rapid socioeconomic developments. Such assessments need information about existing flood protection, still largely unavailable. Here we present the first open-source database of FLood PROtection Standards, FLOPROS, which enables more accurate modelling of flood risk. We also invite specialists to contribute new information to this evolving database.

The assessment of flood risk is important for policymakers to evaluate flood damage and for disaster preparation. Large population densities and high property concentration make cities more vulnerable to floods and have higher damage per year. In Japan, about one billion USD in damage occurs annually due to floods related to rainfall only. In this paper, we report a damage occurrence probability function and a damage cost function for pluvial flood damage to estimate annual flood damage.

The study investigates trends in mean and extreme rainfall, run-off, temperature and their relationship with large-scale atmospheric circulation. It focuses on two Moroccan watersheds; Bouregreg and Tensift, using data from 1977 to 2003. Results do not show a homogeneous behaviour in the catchments; the influence of the large-scale atmospheric circulation is different and a clear spatial dependence of the trend analysis is linked to the distance from the coast and the mountains.

This study investigates how tropical cyclones impact urban residents of Fiji, Vanuatu and Tonga. We investigate how people perceive tropical cyclones (TCs), how they are impacted and what methods of adaptation are used to offset damage from TC activity. We propose a conceptual framework to merge the non-traditional knowledge of weather forecasting and climate science with weather-related traditional knowledge, and explore the possibilities of developing a multidimensional TC forecasting tool.

An application to monitor the response of a beach to single storms, in order to predict shoreline changes and to plan the defence of the shore zone is presented. On the study area, Jesolo (Italy), video and current stations were installed. The methodology, which is economically attractive, proves to be a valuable system for providing detailed indications on beach erosion processes and can be used for improving the collaboration between coastal scientists and managers to solve beach-maintenance problems.

Evaluating social vulnerability is a crucial issue in risk and disaster management. A household social vulnerability index for flood hazards was developed and used to assess the social vulnerability of rural households in a mountainous region. Some mitigation strategies to reduce social vulnerability to flood hazards were proposed based on the assessment results. The results provide useful information for households and local governments to prepare, mitigate and respond to flood hazards.

Earthquakes of volcanic origin (VT) represent a significant hazard in volcanic islands prone to landslides. We present a methodology to forecast large VT earthquakes during volcanic crises based on an algorithm that translates fluctuations of the level of seismicity into 10-day time windows of increased probability of a major event. This algorithm has been successfully applied during the 2011–2013 volcanic crisis at El Hierro (Canary Islands).

For regions with few strong motion records, a seismology-based method is developed to predict PGAs with parameters from small earthquake data, recorded by regional monitoring networks, for Sichuan and Yunnan regions, China. The results are compared with limited strong motion data. Most fit well, except the case of Mw7.0 in Sichuan, since there are no observed data from larger events. The parameters are adopted in strong motion synthesis at two near-fault stations during the Wenchuan Earthquake.

Hazard scientists rarely meet the people that are actually at risk – those in communities prone to natural threats. This paper outlines an attempt to develop a transdisciplinary approach to train geoscientists, using early career researchers in an EU integrated training network studying tectonic processes and geohazards. By integrating local perspectives into the reflection on communication, we explore the form that new strategies for public communication and community engagement might take.

This paper present the results of interviews that were conducted with the developers of apps dedicated to avalanche risk communication. The study investigates the context of their development to determine how choices of content and visualization were made as well as how their effectiveness is evaluated. Results show that consensus is achieved in terms of message but not in terms of visualization. However, progress remains in terms of effectiveness evaluation.

Damage functions are an essential tool for vulnerability assessment and the quantification of disaster loss. They are often tailored to specific hazards and regions, which complicates knowledge transfer between different hazards and places. In our work, we unify approaches for climate-related hazards, e.g. for storms and coastal floods. A unified damage function is embedded in an uncertainty framework, where we identify the dominating sources of uncertainty on local and regional scales.

Snow avalanche data in the French Alps and Pyrenees have been recorded for more than 100 years in several databases. In this manuscript, we present a newly developed web-based system that stores the observed data in a global avalanche database and assists the observers in their daily monitoring activity by providing coherent workflows for a wide range of users with different roles. The new system improves the quality of data and is widely used for fundamental research and operational purposes.

We present a percentile-based calibration of the Canadian Forest Fire Weather Index (FWI) System for the United Kingdom (UK), developed from numerical weather prediction data, and evaluate it using historic wildfire records. The Fine Fuel Moisture Code, Initial Spread Index and final FWI component of the FWI system show the greatest predictive skill for UK wildfires. Our findings provide useful insights for any future redevelopment of the current operational UK fire danger rating system.

Devastating tsunami emphasize the vulnerability of low-lying islands and coasts. Our risk assessment for the three atolls of Tokelau uses computer simulations of tsunami generated by a series of regional and distant earthquakes to inform a community advisory of a threat from tsunami flooding. Great earthquakes off northeastern Japan pose a potential threat, with maximum wave heights >  1 m, but villages remain dry. Informative simulation studies can be achieved on atolls with only basic field data.

This study focuses on the quantification and analysis of geomorphic processes on the barely vegetated slopes of a recultivated iron ore mine on the Italian island of Elba using photographs from terrestrial laser scanning and digital photogrammetry by an unmanned aerial vehicle over a period of 5 1/2 years. Beside this, the study tried to work out the potential and the limitations of both methods to detect surface changes by geomorphic process dynamics within a natural environment.