Publications related to Disaster risk reduction

Characteristics and sources of fluorescent aerosols in the central Arctic Ocean

Julia Schmale, Benjamin Jérémy Laurent Heutte, Jakob Boyd Pernov, Nora Bergner, Ivo Fabio Beck, Oliver Müller, Hélène Paule Angot, Alireza Moallemi, Margarida Teles Nogueira Rolo, Markus Frey

The Arctic is sensitive to cloud radiative forcing. Due to the limited number of aerosols present throughout much of the year, cloud formation is susceptible to the presence of cloud condensation nuclei and ice nucleating particles (INPs). Primary biologic ...

2024

Vision-based Flocking in Aerial Robot Swarms

Fabian Maximilian Schilling

Aerial robot swarms have the potential to perform time-critical and dangerous tasks such as disaster response without compromising human safety. However, their reliance on external infrastructure such as global positioning for localization and wireless net ...

EPFL2022

Practical issues with modeling extreme Brazilian rainfall

Anthony Christopher Davison, Isolde Santos Previdelli, Paulo Vitor Da Costa Pereira

Accurately quantifying extreme rainfall is important for the design of hydraulic structures, for flood mapping and zoning and for disaster management. In order to produce maps of estimates of 25-year rainfall return levels in Brazil, we selected 893 shorte ...

BRAZILIAN STATISTICAL ASSOCIATION2021

A risk-risk assessment framework for solar radiation modification

Concern about the increasingly high-probability, high-impact risks posed by global warming is driving the exploration of new techniques to artificially cool the planet through an approach known as solar radiation modification (SRM). Would the world be bett ...

International Risk Governance Center2021

The challenges of impact evaluation: Attempting to measure the effectiveness of community-based disaster risk management

Anthony Christopher Davison, Nicola Mary Banwell, Silvia Hostettler, Alfredo Rafael Kägi Trejo

Although disaster risk management is becoming increasingly important in development cooperation, there is still a lack of robust evidence regarding its effectiveness. Few studies based on a counterfactual have been conducted in the fields of disaster manag ...

2020

A risk-based multi-level stress test methodology: application to six critical non-nuclear infrastructures in Europe

Anton Schleiss, José Pedro Gamito de Saldanha Calado Matos, Daniela Rodrigues

Recent natural disasters that seriously affected critical infrastructure (CI) with significant socio-economic losses and impact revealed the need for the development of reliable methodologies for vulnerability and risk assessment. In this paper, a risk-bas ...

2020

Barriers to the implementation of international agreements on the ground: Climate change and resilience building in the Araucanía Region of Chile

Nicola Mary Banwell, Silvia Hostettler

Implementing disaster risk reduction (DRR), climate change adaptation and mitigation (CCA/M), and sustainable development are key to increasing community resilience to pressing climate change risks. Barriers to grassroots implementation of national and int ...

2020

Community-based landslide risk reduction: a review of a Red Cross soil bioengineering for resilience program in Honduras

Silvia Hostettler, Antonio D'Acunzi

Effective long-term participation of communities in disaster risk reduction measures in landslide-prone areas continues to be a challenge. This study aims to evaluate the extent to which community-based soil-bioengineering techniques allow for effective mi ...

2019

UAV-Based Situational Awareness System Using Deep Learning

Wenlong Deng

Situational awareness by Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) is important for many applications such as surveillance, search and rescue, and disaster response. In those applications, detecting and locating people and recognizing their actions in near real-time ...

2019

Flexible Disaster Response of Tomorrow: Final Presentation and Evaluation of the CENTAURO System

Xi Chen, Fabian Maximilian Schilling

Mobile manipulation robots have great potential for roles in support of rescuers on disaster-response missions. Robots can operate in places too dangerous for humans and therefore can assist in accomplishing hazardous tasks while their human operators work ...

2019

Essays on adaptation to rare disasters

Takafumi Usui

This thesis aims to further investigate rare natural disasters and studies adaptation decisions under uncertainty by solving several computational economic models. The modeling of rare natural disasters depends on the treatment of catastrophic outcomes wit ...

EPFL2019

The current state and future outlook of rescue robotics

Dario Floreano, Auke Ijspeert, Roland Siegwart, Stefano Mintchev, Kamilo Andres Melo Becerra, Davide Scaramuzza, Tomislav Horvat, Marco Hutter

Robotic technologies, whether they are remotely operated vehicles, autonomous agents, assistive devices, or novel control interfaces, offer many promising capabilities for deployment in real‐world environments. Postdisaster scenarios are a particularly rel ...

2019

Nonmodel-based framework for rapid seismic risk and loss assessment of instrumented steel buildings

Dimitrios Lignos, Seong-Hoon Hwang

This paper proposes a nonmodel-based framework for estimating story-based engineering demand parameters (EDPs) in instrumented steel frame buildings with steel moment-resisting frames (MRFs). The proposed framework utilizes a wavelet-based damage-sensitive ...

Elsevier2018

EaRL: Toolbox for Earthquake Risk and Loss Assessment of Building Assets

Dimitrios Lignos, Ahmed Mohamed Ahmed Elkady, Seong-Hoon Hwang

Infrastructure (asset) risk management is essential for a resilient environment. Several industries are concerned to improve their building asset preparedness subject to seismic hazard. To this end, the development of software tools that quantify and asses ...

2018

Risk perception and decision-making: do farmers consider risks from climate change?

Claudia Rebeca Binder Signer

Small-scale farmers are highly threatened by climate change. Experts often base their interventions to support farmers to adapt to climate change on their own perception of farmers' livelihood risks. However, if differences in risk perception between farme ...

SPRINGER2018

Preface: Special Section on Energy and Food Security in a Humanitarian Context

Silvia Hostettler

Natural disasters, population growth, social conflicts, and political or structural crises give rise to forced migrations, which can lead to humanitarian emergencies. According to the “UNHCR annual global trends report”, 65.6 million people were displaced ...

2017

Slash-and-burn agriculture and tropical cyclone activity in Madagascar: Implication for soil fertility dynamics and corn performance

Alexandre Buttler, Bjorn Jozef Maria Robroek, Robert Thomas Edmund Mills, Justine Marie Gay des Combes, Thomas Guillaume

On the western coast of Madagascar, the dry tropical forest of Kirindy may disappear in the next 50 years because of its rapid conversion into agricultural land by slash-and-burn cultivation. The slash-and-burn fields are cultivated during 3 years in avera ...

Elsevier Science Bv2017

Building up Resilience in a Pharmaceutical Supply Chain through Inventory, Dual Sourcing and Agility Capacity

Ralf Seifert, Florian Christopher Matthias Lücker

This paper is inspired by a risk management problem faced by a leading pharmaceutical company. Key operational risk mitigation measures include Risk Mitigation Inventory (RMI), Dual Sourcing and Agility Capacity. We study the relationship between these thr ...

2017

Combining Human Computing and Machine Learning to Make Sense of Big (Aerial) Data for Disaster Response

Stéphane Joost, Devis Tuia, Matthew Josef Parkan, Carlos Castillo, Muhammad Imran, Patrick Meier, Julien Briant

Aerial imagery captured via unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) is playing an increasingly important role in disaster response. Unlike satellite imagery, aerial imagery can be captured and processed within hours rather than days. In addition, the spatial resol ...

Mary Ann Liebert, Inc2016

Bio-inspired balance controller for a humanoid robot

Auke Ijspeert, Renaud Ronsse, Nicolas Benoît Dominique Van der Noot, François André Heremans

Humanoid robots are gaining much interest nowadays. This is partly motivated by the ability of such robots to replace humans in dangerous environments being specifically designed for humans, such as man-made or natural disaster scenarios. However, existing ...

Ieee2016