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Forecasting and early warning systems are important investments to protect lives, properties, and livelihood. While early warning systems are frequently used to predict the magnitude, location, and timing of potentially damaging events, these systems rarely provide impact estimates, such as the expected amount and distribution of physical damage, human consequences, disruption of services, or financial loss. Complementing early warning systems with impact forecasts has a twofold advantage: It would provide decision makers with richer information to take informed decisions about emergency measures and focus the attention of different disciplines on a common target. This would allow capitalizing on synergies between different disciplines and boosting the development of multihazard early warning systems. This review discusses the state of the art in impact forecasting for a wide range of natural hazards. We outline the added value of impact-based warnings compared to hazard forecasting for the emergency phase, indicate challenges and pitfalls, and synthesize the review results across hazard types most relevant for Europe. Plain Language Summary Forecasting and early warning systems are important investments to protect lives, properties and livelihood. While such systems are frequently used to predict the magnitude, location, and timing of potentially damaging events, they rarely provide impact estimates, such as the expected physical damage, human consequences, disruption of services, or financial loss. Extending hazard forecast systems to include impact estimates promises many benefits for the emergency phase, for instance, for organizing evacuations. We review and compare the state of the art of impact forecasting across a wide range of natural hazards and outline opportunities and key challenges for research and development of impact forecasting. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

With an ever-increasing volume and complexity of data collected from a variety of sources, the efficient management of geospatial information becomes a key topic in disaster risk management. For example, the representation of assets exposed to natural disasters is subjected to changes throughout the different phases of risk management reaching from pre-disaster mitigation to the response after an event and the long-term recovery of affected assets. Spatio-temporal changes need to be integrated into a sound conceptual and technological framework able to deal with data coming from different sources, at varying scales, and changing in space and time. Especially managing the information life-cycle, the integration of heterogeneous information and the distributed versioning and release of geospatial information are important topics that need to become essential parts of modern exposure modelling solutions. The main purpose of this study is to provide a conceptual and technological framework to tackle the requirements implied by disaster risk management for describing exposed assets in space and time. An information life-cycle management solution is proposed, based on a relational spatio-temporal database model coupled with Git and GeoGig repositories for distributed versioning. Two application scenarios focusing on the modelling of residential building stocks are presented to show the capabilities of the implemented solution. A prototype database model is shared on GitHub along with the necessary scenario data. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The RIESGOS Project (Multi-Risk Analysis And Information System Components for the Andes Region) funded by the German Ministry of Science and education (BMBF) has, as one of its main goals, the design and development of distributed software components for multi-hazard and risk analysis in particular by simulating hypothetical future high-impact events and their consequences. Implemented as an open library of interacting Web-services, these components will cover a full range of multi-hazard and risk related data acquisition and simulation services. These services include, for example: query of a seismic catalog, simulation of a shake map, simulation of a tsunami inundation scenario and assessment of expected damage and loss under consideration of cascading effects to critical infrastructure. Individual Web-services can be flexibly combined to produce multi-hazard scenarios with the ultimate goal to assist local authorities and decision makers to explore factors influencing the risk in their specific multi-hazard environments, thus improving disaster risk reduction and disaster management activities.To facilitate the development of a project which encompasses diverse hazard and risk components of various nature, our research is organized along a set of pre-described 'event stories' representing realistic, complex multi-hazard events with cascading effects in selected pilot regions of Chile, Peru and Ecuador. For each story, a storyboard is developed, which provides a narrative description of a hypothetical crisis evolution, defines the specific hazards involved, the related exposed assets and the expected consequences. In particular, these event stories target the following topics: - earthquake and tsunami (Chile and Peru); - heavy rain and river flooding (Peru); - volcano instability, lahar event and subsequent flooding via temporary river blockage (Ecuador). Each story can then be analysed in a more quantitative way by estimating different scenarios through numerical analysis and simulation of the different risk components. Remarkably, the consideration of vulnerability in a multi-hazard risk assessment framework is significantly more challenging with respect to the single hazard case, especially when interaction may occur at the vulnerability level due to physical damage accumulation. Furthermore, the project also aims at considering cascading effects to critical infrastructure such as power grids, roads and bridges. In order to ease up the visual exploration of such a complex multi-risk framework, a Web-based demonstrator platform integrating decentralized OGC Web Processing Service instances into multi-hazard and risk scenarios is being developed. To better meet the requirements of end-users, a thorough analysis of users' needs and continued user participation during the whole development process is assured. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]