简介: |
Natural and man-made hazards increasingly threaten society and economy. Due to the climate change, weather related natural disasters have been dramatically increasing, both in frequency and in strength. Moreover, the increasing exposure and vulnerability of our modern interlaced societies contributes to intensifying their impact. The risk associated to natural hazards is usually understood as an aggregation of an event’s likelihood and its impact. As the likelihood of occurrence of hazards cannot be influenced in the short term and is harder and harder to predict, decision-makers need to implement adequate adaptation and mitigation strategies to reduce the vulnerability of the threatened regions. Particularly, when time is very short, the identification of vulnerability drivers enables spending scarce resources in an efficient way.
Today, there is the need for approaches that define vulnerability such that it addresses the specific territorial, economic, social and cultural characteristics and captures the preferences of stakeholders and decision-makers. Another challenge is the development of methods that can be adapted and easily updated as new information becomes available and that enables the integration of information from sources as heterogeneous as information available on Social Media platforms and information derived from simulations models. To support decision makers managing risks, near real-time assessments are required that enable analyses on the basis of uncertain or lacking information. To this end, I discuss the use of a scalable and dynamic indicator model that is closely related to the hierarchical models from Multi-Criteria Decision Analysis, which enables the combination of heterogeneous types of information while keeping track of the associated uncertainty. |
