Natural Hazards and Earth System Sciences

2nd International Conference on Ecohydrology and Climate Change, EcoHCC'11

The International Conference Ecohydrology and Climate Change (EcoHCC) is to be held at the Polytechnic Institute of Tomar, Portugal, between 15 and 17 September 2011, and is a joint organization between the Polytechnic Institute of Tomar (IPT) and the Institute of Mediterranean Agricultural and Environmental Sciences (ICAAM) of the University of Évora (Portugal). The first edition of the EcoHCC conference was in 2009 and was planned to be a biannual meeting. Hence, EcoHCC'11 will be its second edition.

In its first edition, EcoHCC'09 was attended by European and South American researchers in the fields of Climate, Ecohydrology, Environment, Hydrology, Soils and Geo-Statistics. This first edition was particularly successful in contributing to the interchange of scientific know-how and by promoting the integration of these themes on a multidisciplinary framework. This year, EcoHCC'11 will be focused on the following themes:

• Water resources and management;
• Water quality and hydrobiology;
• Environmental policies and social impacts;
• Operational and dynamical hydrology. Ecohydrology;
• Soil degradation and soil quality. Soil function and land use;
• Earth System Science, climate change and extreme events.

We believe these themes are pertinent and of great relevance in the current global socioeconomic context, particularly under the additional threats and challenges imposed by climate change. Projections of future climate change on a global scale are known qualitatively in its essence, however, the same does not happen with the regional implications of those projections and the impacts of regional climate scenarios on water resources, agriculture, soil quality, drought, and quality of life of societies. The nature of these impacts have yet to be known, has they will determine the definition of adaptation measures and new environmental policies.

The link between climate change and Ecohydrology is noticeable. Nonetheless, potential scientific contributions in areas still under-development are worth emphasising. As such, classical monitoring and remote sensing, modelling and use of geographic information systems, advanced computing, economics and sociology approaches, among others, will be discussed in EcoHCC'11. We indeed believe this conference will further promote the integrated research, in some areas still incipient, but of key importance in the formulation of suitable adaptation measures and new sustainable policies. Due to the relevance of the themes discussed, we believe that the publication of the Special issue of EcoHCC'11 is a valuable contribution to the scientific community.

This Special Issue intends to allow the authors who presented a significant contribution at the Session NH3.9 of the General Assembly that took place this year to publish their work and their advancements in the fields of landslides and debris flows monitoring, mathematical modelling and design of mitigation measures.

The special issue will cover a broad spectrum of aspects and will have a very inter- and transdisciplinary character. Besides research results concerning natural processes, engineering and socioeconomic aspects, the special issue will also touch the question of implementing research findings in practice.

This special issue is intended to collect papersthat promote the discussion between scientists from HMR and ICT communities, together with delegates from relevant European and worldwide stakeholders (European Commission and World Meteorological Organization) about how to further boost the research excellence and competitiveness in the fields of hydrometeorological research and Grid research by bridging the gaps between these two scientific communities.

In the Lisbon strategy, the 2005 European Council identified knowledge and innovation as the engines of sustainable growth and stated that it is essential to build a fully inclusive information society. In parallel, the World Conference on Disaster Reduction (Hyogo, 2005), defined among its thematic priorities the improvement of international cooperation in hydrometeorology research activities. This was recently confirmed at the joint press conference of the Center for Research on Epidemiology of Disasters (CRED) with the United Nations International Strategy for Disaster Reduction (UNISDR) Secretariat, held on January 2009, where it was noted that flood and storm events are among the natural disasters that most impact human life. Hydrometeorological science has made strong progress over the last decade at the European and worldwide level: new modelling tools, post processing methodologies and observational data are available. Recent European efforts in developing a platform for e-science, like EGEE (Enabling Grids for E-sciencE), SEEGRID-SCI (South East Europe GRID e-Infrastructure for regional e-Science), and the German C3-Grid, provide an ideal basis for the sharing of complex hydrometeorological data sets and tools. Despite these early initiatives, however, the awareness of the potential of the Grid technology as a catalyst for future hydrometeorological research is still low and both the adoption and the exploitation have astonishingly been slow, not only within individual EC member states, but also on a European scale. At European Commission level, the goal of the Distributed Research Infrastructure for Hydro-Meteorology Study (DRIHMS,www.drihms.eu, co-Founded by the EC under the 7th Framework Programme) project is the promotion of the Grid culture within the European hydrometeorological research (HMR) community through the diffusion of a Grid platform for e-collaboration in this earth science sector.

Thus, this special issue is intended to collect papers that promote the discussion between scientists from HMR and ICT communities, together with delegates from relevant European and worldwide stakeholders (European Commission and World Meteorological Organization) about how to further boost the research excellence and competitiveness in the fields of hydrometeorological research and Grid research by bridging the gaps between these two scientific communities.

The Sea Hazard Group in the EGU Natural Hazards Division has grown significantly and consists of 5 different sessions in the 2011 EGU General Assembly:

• NH5.1 New developments in tsunami science and in mitigation of tsunami risk, including early warning;
• NH5.2 Extreme sea waves;
• NH5.3 Nonlinear dynamics of the coastal zone;
• NH5.4 Coastal flooding and erosion risk: present and future;
• NH5.5 Storm surges and coastal areas: extreme events, damages, and risk.

We propose publishing of the NHESS special issue "Sea Hazards" collecting the best contributions presented in EGU 2011 under NH5 Group. Participation in this special issue will be by invitation only. We expect 20-30 papers, which will be selected during EGU General Assembly in Vienna. All Guest Editors are conveners of the NH5 sessions.

As recently experienced in Japan, tsunamis represent one of the most important risk sources for low-lying coastal zones and their inhabitants, due to both their destructive potential and their unpredictability. The tsunami of 26 December 2004, which hit the Andaman Sea coast of Thailand, caused thousands of casualties, disrupted economies and social well-being in many coastal communities and resulted in drastic changes of the coastal zone and marine environment. This tsunami also revealed a gap in scientific knowledge, beginning from the triggering of tsunamis offshore to the various impacts to the natural environments on the shelf, coastal areas and on land and to the economic and social systems consequences. An interdisciplinary Thai – German research project ("TRIAS" – Tracing Tsunami Impacts On- and Offshore in the Andaman Sea Region) was launched, addressing the following topics:

• Where and how can tsunamis be triggered in the Andaman Sea and what are the indicators of tsunami generating mechanisms?
• How often have tsunamis struck the coast of the Andaman Sea in the recent past and how does sedimentary evidence on- and offshore look like?
• What are the impacts of tsunamis to the seafloor morphology, sediment cover and to the marine & littoral ecosystems?
• How is tsunami wave energy attenuated in the nearshore zone, beachfront and hinterland and how is this attenuation influenced by the presence of natural barriers such as coastal forests and artificial barriers?
• What factors determine the tsunami-related vulnerability of low-lying coastal areas, their population, communities and economies?
• Which kind of socio-economic, institutional and/or other factors make coastal societies or communities resilient against tsunami impacts and how can risk management, including early warning, be improved to prevent/mitigate future tsunami disasters along coasts?

The questions above provided a feasible basis for addressing key issues of tsunami research. While in the offshore domain natural processes dominate, towards onshore and especially on land anthropogenic influences increase and trigger the vulnerability. Consequently, individual research groups have established a research network to contribute to the enhancement of the region's ability to cope with tsunami risks.

The objective of this Special Issue is to complement individual research issues in such a way that a clear picture can be drawn about the destructive forces and processes of the 2004 tsunami and past tsunamis and to elaborate and to suggest measures how to avoid or mitigate future tsunami impacts and destructions.

2007 is a crucial year: 50% of the population is living in urban areas. Furthermore, it has been forecasted that this number will double in the next 30 years. This increase rate corresponds to a new city of 1 million people every week during the next 40 years. This exponential curve is enough to imagine that cities become more vulnerable: issues we will have to face dealing with risk management become more complex. Moreover, this quick urbanization comes with climate change uncertainties. Climate change, coupled with people and asset concentration in cities, is the worst combination to set up a sustainable natural hazard management plan. As an example, floods are considered the major natural hazard in the EU in terms of risk to people and assets. Currently, more than 40 bn € per year are spent on flood mitigation and recovery in the EU. More than 75 % of the damage caused by floods is occurring in urban areas. Climate change and concentration of population and assets in urban areas are main trends likely to affect these numbers in the near future. Global warming is expected to lead to more severe storm and rainfall events as well as to increasing river discharges and sea level rise. This means that flood risk is likely to increase significantly. At least, urban systems contain assets of high value and complex and interdependent infrastructure networks (i.e. power supplies, communications, water, transport etc.). The infrastructure networks are critical for the continuity of economic activities as well as for the people’s basic living needs. Their availability is also required for fast and effective recovery after disasters (floods, hurricanes, earthquakes, landslides...).

The severity of damage therefore largely depends on the degree that both high value assets and critical urban infrastructure are affected, either directly or indirectly.

In this context, we obtain a urban society:

• more and more menaced by a lot of natural hazards;
• more and more vulnerable due to increasing issues and complex urban system relations;
• less and less resilient.

This special issue aims at discussing how researchers, practitioners and professionals are integrating the resilient concept to set up new risk management approaches and to design more resilient and flexible cities to face all types of natural hazards. Indeed, a lot of projects in the EU are now trying to use the concept of resilience to mitigate different types of risks in urban areas. This special issue represents a great opportunity to build up a state of the art on research about resilient cities. We are attending articles combining different disciplines, bringing conceptual elements on resilience but also tangible applications. All methods, frameworks, tools (GIS) designed to reduce risks in cities and integrating the resilience concept are welcome in this special issue.

In many parts of the world, weather represents one of the major uncertainties affecting performance and management of agricultural systems. Due to global climate changes the climatic variability and the occurrence of extreme weather events is likely to increase leading to substantial increase in agricultural risk and destabilization of farm incomes. This fact is not only important for farm managers but also for policy makers, since income stabilization in agriculture is frequently considered as a governmental task. The aim of this special issue is to discuss the state of the art research in the area of analysis and management of weather-related risks in agriculture. Both structural and non-structural measures can be used to reduce the impact of climate variability including extreme weather on crop production. While the structural measures include strategies such as irrigation, water harvesting, windbreaks etc., the non-structural measures include the use of the medium range weather forecast and crop insurance.

The topic is at the borderline of different disciplines, in particular agricultural and financial economics, meteorology, modeling and agronomy. Thus, this special issue offers several ideas and views on weather-related risks across these disciplines with the focus on quantifying the impact of extreme weather on agricultural production including impacts of climate change, analysis of financial instruments that allow reducing or sharing weather related risks and evaluation of risk management strategies on the farm level.

The studies have been selected from presentations at the EGU from a session which brought together different methodologies and novel methods of analyses but that can have a wide range of applications. All have in common an integrated, cross-disciplinary approach, one of the main targets in this special issue.

The purpose of the special issue is to give an overview of the results of the multidisciplinary research project MEDUP, which is a 3-year project funded by the ANR (French National Research Agency).

MEDUP deals with the quantification and identification of sources of uncertainties associated with the forecast and climate projection for Mediterranean high-impact weather events. The propagation of these uncertainties on the environment is also considered, as well as how they may combine with the intrinsic uncertainties of the vulnerability and risk analysis methods. An original feature of MEDUP is to address these questions at one and the same time for weather forecasting (from 3h up to 10 days forecast range, with a focus on shorter range), seasonal forecasting (from 1 month to 3 month range) and climate scenario simulations (from 1960 to 2050). MEDUP is also innovative in considering the whole uncertainty chain, from the atmospheric modelling of high-impact weather events to their consequences on the environment. The atmospheric modeling uncertainties will be thus propagated on the vulnerability of the hydrosystems taking into account the feedbacks of landuse/ land-cover changes and also interpreted in terms of economic losses, as well as in terms of consequences on individual decision making and risk management in the region. The MEDUP project lies within the framework of HyMeX, in developing modeling and forecasting tools which could be deployed during this 10-year program.

The objective of the Special Issue is to analyze the state-of-the-art in the field of land management in relation to geo-hydrological hazards. The volume will collect papers produced by different groups working in the field of natural hazards, geo-hydrological risk, land-use planning and urban planning. After an introduction about the general problem, case studies for current land/urban management related to geo-hydrological hazards will be presented and an overview of landslides, muddy-debris flows and floods in urban areas and related management strategies will be supplied. Issues of the insurance against natural hazards will be discussed with some link to different countries. The aim of the Special Issue is to inform the international scientific community and especially technicians, politicians and urban planning authorities about the results of studies and researches that have been carried out in this field, suggesting a sort of guidelines for a sustainable land management.