Knowledge Base highlights and editors' picks

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Every week the PreventionWeb team of editors selects the latest news and research, reports and publications on disaster risk reduction – here is their selection of the latest must-read content.

Update

3 June 2022

“Landslide graveyard” holds clues to long-term tsunami trends

A new project looks to unearth information about and learn from ancient underwater landslides buried deep beneath the seafloor to support New Zealand’s resilience to natural hazards.

Eos - AGU

A view of the Sixty Dome Mosque, part of Mosque City, a UNESCO World Heritage Site in Bagherhat, in southern Bangladesh.

Update

6 June 2022

Bangladesh's historic coastal mosques feel climate change's bite

Worsening climate-change-driven heat, heavy rainfall and storm surges threaten Bangladesh's coastal mosques. What needs to be done to protect them?

Thomson Reuters Foundation, trust.org

Update

6 June 2022

Tonga recovers its voice in the wake of deadly volcanic eruption

The eruption of the Hunga Tonga-Hunga Ha’apai volcano in January 2022 was a stark reminder of how telecommunications preparedness can mean the difference between silence and life-saving response.

World Food Programme

Ukraine - rubble in a bombed residential area

Blog

07 Jun 2022

Olivia Nielsen Dave Hodgkin

Rebuilding Ukraine: The imminent risks from asbestos

The war in Ukraine will have cascading, long-term impacts – including a secondary environmental disaster caused by uncontrolled asbestos. In reconstruction, strategic planning around asbestos hazard management is needed to ensure a better, safer recovery.

Update

3 June 2022

A root cause of flooding in Accra: developers clogging up the city’s wetlands

Ghana has six designated Ramsar sites. These are wetlands designated under the criteria of the Ramsar Convention on Wetlands, an international treaty that seeks to protect them.

Conversation Media Group, the

Indian farmer transporting harvest goods on a bike in a flooded street

Update

2 June 2022

Walking in the shadow of Madhya Pradesh’s devastating floods

A walk along the River Sindh in central India reveals lasting damage from floods in August 2021, when unprecedented rainfall and mismanaged water reservoirs led to widespread losses for the region’s farmers.

The Third Pole

Research briefs

2 June 2022

Monitoring earthquakes at the speed of light

A new study has described a machine learning model that recognizes patterns in seismic data to better estimate the magnitude and location of a large earthquake on the basis of prompt elastogravity signals, using modeling scenarios of earthquakes in Japan.

Eos - AGU

Research briefs

1 June 2022

How buildings contribute to urban heating during heat waves

Heat waves and urban heat island effects reinforce each other’s effects. Researchers used a new method modelling urban building energy to examine the variation over time and space in emissions of waste heat from buildings in Los Angeles.

United States Department of Energy

Update

31 May 2022

The Wall of Wind can blow away buildings at Category 5 hurricane strength to help engineers design safer homes – but even that isn’t powerful enough

In an airplane hangar in Miami, engineers are recreating some of the most powerful hurricane winds to ever strike land. These Category 5 winds can shatter a test building in the blink of an eye.

Conversation Media Group, the

Update

19 May 2022

Insurers need to fundamentally change business models to achieve climate resiliency

World Property and Casualty Insurance Report 2022: research suggests that only 8% of insurers are resilience champions; 73% of policyholders rank climate change among their top concerns.

Capgemini