Multi-hazard susceptibility and exposure assessment of the Hindu Kush Himalaya

Autor: Tzu-Hsin Karen Chen, Jack Rusk, Karen C. Seto, Amina Maharjan, Sara Shneiderman, Prakash C. Tiwari, Mark Turin
Přispěvatelé: Yale University [New Haven], Kumaun University, University of British Columbia (UBC)
Rok vydání: 2022
Předmět:
Environmental Engineering
010504 meteorology & atmospheric sciences
Disaster risk reduction
Population
Multi-hazard risk
01 natural sciences
Wildfires
Hindu Kush Himalaya
Urbanization
Natural hazard
Human settlement
11. Sustainability
[SPI.GCIV.RISQ]Engineering Sciences [physics]/Civil Engineering/Risques
Humans
Environmental Chemistry
education
Waste Management and Disposal
0105 earth and related environmental sciences
Exposure assessment
education.field_of_study
Landslide
04 agricultural and veterinary sciences
15. Life on land
Pollution
Hazard
Floods
Cascading and compounding hazards
Geography
13. Climate action
[SHS.ENVIR]Humanities and Social Sciences/Environmental studies
[SDE]Environmental Sciences
040103 agronomy & agriculture
0401 agriculture
forestry
and fisheries
Physical geography
Zdroj: Science of the Total Environment
Science of the Total Environment, Elsevier, 2022, 804, pp.150039. ⟨10.1016/j.scitotenv.2021.150039⟩
ISSN: 0048-9697
1879-1026
Popis: International audience; Mountainous regions are highly hazardous, and these hazards often lead to loss of human life. The Hindu Kush Himalaya (HKH), like many mountainous regions, is the site of multiple and overlapping natural hazards, but the distribution of multi-hazard risk and the populations exposed to it are poorly understood. Here, we present high-resolution transboundary models describing susceptibility to floods, landslides, and wildfires to understand population exposure to multi-hazard risk across the HKH. These models are created from historical remotely sensed data and hazard catalogs by the maximum entropy (Maxent) machine learning technique. Our results show that human settlements in the HKH are disproportionately concentrated in areas of high multi-hazard risk. In contrast, low-hazard areas are disproportionately unpopulated. Nearly half of the population in the region lives in areas that are highly susceptible to more than one hazard. Warm low-altitude foothill areas with peren- nially moist soils were identified as highly susceptible to multiple hazards. This area comprises only 31% of the study region, but is home to 49% of its population. The results also show that areas susceptible to multiple hazards are also major corridors of current migration and urban expansion, suggesting that current rates and patterns of urbanization will continue to put more people at risk. This study establishes that the population in the HKH is concentrated in areas susceptible to multiple hazards and suggests that current patterns of human movement will continue to increase exposure to multi-hazards in the HKH.
Databáze: OpenAIRE
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