This session aims to share innovative approaches to developing multi-hazard risk assessments and their components, and to explore their applications to critical infrastructure management, disaster risk reduction and climate change adaptation. Effective disaster risk reduction practices and the planning of resilient communities and critical infrastructure requires the evaluation of multiple hazards and their interactions. This approach is endorsed by the UN Sendai Framework for Disaster Risk Reduction. Multi-hazard risk and multi-hazard impact assessments look at interaction mechanisms among different natural hazards, and how spatial and temporal overlap of hazards influences the exposure and vulnerability of elements at risk. Moreover, the uncertainty associated with multi-hazard risk scenarios needs to be considered, particularly in the context of climate change and evolving vulnerabilities.

Based on recent theoretical progresses, projects such as the NARSIS project (www.narsis.eu) aim at making significant scientific step forward towards addressing the update of some elements required for the safety assessment, particularly natural hazards risk characterization (including vulnerability and uncertainty analysis), in particular by considering concomitant external events, either simultaneous-yet-independent hazards or cascading events, and the correlation in intra-event intensity parameters.

This session, therefore, aims to profile a diverse range of multi-hazard risk and impact approaches, including hazard interactions, multi-vulnerability studies, and multi-hazard exposure characterization and approaches taken to assess multi-hazard risk to critical infrastructure. In covering the whole risk assessment chain, we propose that it will be easier to identify potential research gaps, synergies and opportunities for future collaborations.