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

Atlas Narratives of Anthropogenic Transformations across the Vietnamese Mekong Delta's Urban-Rural Territories: Water Ecosystems as Subject for the Social Ecological Transition

Well beyond the impact of climate change, anthropogenic modifications of the Vietnam Mekong Delta's ecosystems have resulted in environmental degradation and subsequent loss in ecosystems. The environmental impacts include but are not limited to accelerate ...

EPFL2023

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

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

Silvia Hostettler, Nicola Mary Banwell

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

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

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

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

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

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

Managing Risks when Using Nanomaterials in Research

Thierry Meyer, Amela Groso, Anna Maria Novello, Elina Buitrago

As the number of engineered nanomaterials (ENM) used in research increases with an incredible speed, health and safety specialists are continuously faced with the challenge of evaluating the risks involved with these materials. Nowadays there is not enough ...

2019

A central limit theorem for functions of stationary max-stable random fields on R-d

Clément Dombry, Erwan Fabrice Koch

Max-stable random fields are very appropriate for the statistical modelling of spatial extremes. Hence, integrals of functions of max-stable random fields over a given region can play a key role in the assessment of the risk of natural disasters, meaning t ...

ELSEVIER2019

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

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

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

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

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

Science, technology and the future of small autonomous drones

Dario Floreano

We are witnessing the advent of a new era of robots — drones — that can autonomously fly in natural and man-made environments. These robots, often associated with defence applications, could have a major impact on civilian tasks, including transportation, ...

Nature Publishing Group2015

Automated Damage Index Estimation of Reinforced Concrete Columns for Post-Earthquake Evaluations

The safety of buildings which have been affected by a natural disaster such as an earthquake is currently evaluated manually by certified inspectors who identify visible damage on the structural elements. This process has been proven to be time-consuming, ...

American Society of Civil Engineers2015

Learning from vernacular building practices: A starting point for risk mitigation

Milo Hofmann, Annalisa Caimi

In most natural disaster prone areas, vernacular builders have implemented affordable strategies that have proven to perform adequately during natural hazards. Learning from these practices represents a great potential to further strengthen the resilience ...

Crc Press-Taylor & Francis Group2014

Soft Pneumatic Actuators for Legged Locomotion

Jamie Paik, Yixin Bai, Juan Manuel Florez Marin, Benjamin Shih

Search and rescue robots are being used more frequently to access hazardous environments to assess situations and locate survivors. There are a wide range of existing mobile platforms for various situations and environments, but these robots are typically ...

2014