Assessing vulnerabilities and resilience to mountain hazards

Losses and negative impacts caused by natural hazards increase worldwide. Research, however, is targeted mainly at the assessment of the natural processes themselves, rather than on their interaction with the built environment and affected communities. The understanding of this interaction and its assessment is the key to vulnerability reduction and increasing of resilience to natural hazards in mountain areas and beyond.

In this session, we welcome studies unveiling the dynamic root causes of vulnerability and aiming at the analysis and reduction of all its dimensions (physical, economic, social, environmental, cultural and institutional). Moreover, contributions focusing on the resilience of affected communities and the built environment to natural hazards in all phases of the disaster cycle and particularly the reconstruction phase (“build back better”) are of special interest. Additionally, we invite submissions concentrating on knowledge management, innovative data collection techniques, and citizen science related to the vulnerability and resilience of the elements at risk.