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

Quartiers rhodaniens en transition

Over the course of history, the relationship between cities and their waters has shown different gradients of interweaving, marked by cycles of bonding and distancing. Following a period of complete neglect of urban watercourses, the versatile, multifacete ...

EPFL2024

Relating health benefits of water, sanitation, and hygiene services with the context of urban informal settlements: lessons from Côte d'Ivoire and Kenya

Vitor Pessoa Colombo

This thesis is inscribed in the recent efforts to reconnect urban planning and public health. It focused on the context of sub-Saharan African cities, for they offer invaluable lessons regarding environmental health determinants and potential solutions to ...

EPFL2023

Safety risk management in University laboratories

Anastasia Jung

Risk management has become an essential element in the functioning of modern society. Correct risk identification and assessment are undoubtedly crucial to improving overall safety; nevertheless, often, it is accompanied by the wrong selection of correctiv ...

EPFL2023

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

NanoSafe III: A User Friendly Safety Management System for Nanomaterials in Laboratories and Small Facilities

Thierry Meyer, Alke Fink, Anna Maria Novello, Elina Buitrago

Research in nanoscience continues to bring forward a steady stream of new nanomaterials and processes that are being developed and marketed. While scientific committees and expert groups deal with the harmonization of terminology and legal challenges, risk ...

2021

Semi-quantitative Model for Risk Assessment in University Laboratories

Thierry Meyer, Anastasia Jung

University chemical laboratories, contrary to common perception, are dangerous working environments. Unlike industry, where most processes are standardized, in academia, they are modified so frequently that in-depth and detailed risk assessment becomes unf ...

Springer, Cham2021

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

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

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

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

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

Efficient management of nanomaterial hazards in a large number of research laboratories in an academic environment

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 ...

2020

Assessing Subaquatic Mass Movement Hazards: an Integrated Observational and Hydrodynamic Modelling Approach

Alfred Johny Wüest, Damien Bouffard, Nathalie Dubois, Carl Love Mikael Råman Vinnå

High-resolution lake and reservoir bathymetric surveys can pinpoint locations that may experience underwater landslides (subaquatic sedimentary mass movements). These can pose a risk to underwater and shoreline infrastructure. This paper outlines an approa ...

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

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

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

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

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

Hospital climate actions and assessment tools: a scoping review protocol

Nicola Mary Banwell

Introduction Health and climate change are inexorably linked through the exacerbation of health risks and the contribution of the health sector to greenhouse gas emissions. Climate action in healthcare settings is critical to reduce risks and impacts of cl ...

BMJ PUBLISHING GROUP2019

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