Multi-hazard open access software package review with the potential for conducting sectoral risk assessments on a European or local scale

As part of the NARSIS (New Approach to Reactor Safety ImprovementS, www.narsis.eu) project, and the MYRIAD-EU (Multi-hazard and sYstemic framework for enhancing Risk-Informed mAnagement and Decision-making in the EU, www.myriadproject.eu) project, a compendium of existing open access software packages for risk modelling of natural hazards, as well as a review of multi-hazard projects has been undertaken with a clear focus on assessments in Europe.

There have been over 200 open access software packages produced for the evaluation of singular natural hazards, combinations of natural hazards and multi-hazard identified either propagating through to risk, or calculating extensive hazard metrics. By far, the most have been built for floods, and earthquakes, however a number have been designed for multi-hazard (RiskSCAPE, HAZUS and variants, CLIMADA, NARSIS-MHE, InaSAFE to name a few).

In around 120 of them, they have moved through to risk assessment, with the calculation of risk metrics. Many of these have been designed for scenario analysis, but there are also many which employ probabilistic methods or stochastic models to evaluate risk. In this work, the classification of the open access software packages follows that of previous studies (Daniell et al., 2014), but with a focus on the use for multi-hazard assessment rather than singular hazards.

Moving through to multi-risk, a number include different interconnected systems for assets (OOFIMS for instance from the EU SYNER-G project). Although there are very few that deal with consecutive or coinciding hazards, a number can be adapted to do this, and some even have the ability to be used for cascading hazard analysis.

By understanding the state-of-the-art in existing software packages as of 2022, a multi-hazard framework can be produced for various economic sectors such as ecosystems and forestry, energy, finance, food and agriculture, infrastructure and transport, as well as tourism, to solve some of the missing links when looking at the impacts of consecutive, coinciding or cascading hazards. In addition, relevant software packages have been found to conduct assessments on the European scale, but also on the local scale for more detailed analyses.