Understanding water-related multi-hazards in a sustainable development context

This innovative PhD aims to assess hydrometeorological drivers, river basin controls and local impacts of hydrologically-induced landslides and floods in a multi-hazard framework.

Project description
Hydrologically-induced landslides and floods are among the most destructive natural hazards globally. Water-related research in many developing countries is often hindered by a variety of issues, such as topographic complexity (especially in mountain regions), intensive and poorly understood climate patterns (e.g., the South Asian monsoon). This make data collection problematic and limit transferability of findings from elsewhere to data-scarce regions. Consequently, there is a paucity of critical knowledge about landslides and floods space-time distribution, controls and local impacts.

Often research on natural hazards adopts a single-hazard approach. But in many regions, and mountains in particular, there is a direct connection between landslides and other hazards - notably flooding. Thus, hazards overlap and interactions (or cascades) between hazards take place. By omitting these inter-relationships, there is potential to underestimate risk or increase vulnerability.

Water-related hazards are associated typically with intense and/ or prolonged rainfall events that alter material strength to cause landslides, or generate rapid runoff resulting in floods. Although meteorology is known to be a key driver of these hazards, the response to rainfall inputs is modified spatially and temporally by river basin properties (including relief, relative position within the basin, geology, soils, land use change and infrastructure development).

This innovative PhD aims to assess hydrometeorological drivers, river basin controls and local impacts of hydrologically-induced landslides and floods in a multi-hazard framework. It will use as the main case study the Middle Mountains of Nepal, which are a global hotspot of water-related hazards, but we aim to include other cases for comparative analysis and testing of transferability of knowledge and methods. The aim will be met through the following specific objectives: (1) to identify the rainfall characteristics (or 'signatures' - including long-term rainfall climatology, antecedent rainfall accumulation and event duration-intensity) linked to landslides, floods or the occurrence of both; (2) to ascertain the locations and time periods of greatest/ least multi-hazard sensitivity to rainfall signatures; (3) to analyses the role of basin characteristics in moderating rainfall signature sensitivity of multi-hazards; and (4) to construct statistical, GIS based models to yield predictive multi-hazard vulnerability maps across the river basin based rainfall and landscape metrics.

Prediction and early warning of cascading, multi-hazards is vital to increase human preparedness and, thus, to increase potential resilience of people and infrastructure. This studentship will yield information of direct practical relevance with potential to support decision making/ early warning systems for water-related natural disasters reduction.