Rapid glacier retreat in the Nepal Himalaya has accelerated the formation and expansion of glacial lakes, increasing the likelihood of glacial lake outburst floods (GLOFs) with potentially severe downstream consequences. Existing GLOF studies in Nepal are largely site-specific and lack national-scale consistency, limiting their utility for systematic hazard planning. Here, we present a comprehensive, multi-scenario GLOF hazard assessment for Nepal based on three decades of satellite observations (1990–2023) and large-scale hydrodynamic modelling. Using multi-temporal remote sensing, we mapped 1,232 glacial lakes, including 265 newly formed lakes, and estimated lake volumes and peak discharges using established empirical relationships. Downstream flood propagation was simulated using the LISFLOOD-FP hydrodynamic model, enabling consistent, high-resolution inundation mapping across the country. To examine plausible future conditions under continued glacier retreat, we implemented scenario-based lake-volume increases of 10–50%, representing optimistic, intermediate, and pessimistic states. Results indicate a ~26.9% increase in total glacial lake area since 1990, with the most pronounced expansion in the Koshi and Karnali provinces. Modelled inundation extents and flood depths, particularly exceeding 3.5 m, increase substantially under higher-volume scenarios. Koshi and Karnali consistently emerge as the most exposed regions, with heightened impacts on settlements, hydropower infrastructure, and transport networks. The resulting national-scale GLOF hazard atlas provides a coherent framework for visualising present and future flood hazards and offers a practical basis for climate adaptation planning and disaster risk reduction in high-mountain regions.

How to cite: Saha, S., Singh, H., and Mohanty, M. P.: Nationwide Multi-Scenario GLOF Hazard Mapping in Nepal Using Remote Sensing and Hydrodynamic Modelling, EGU General Assembly 2026, Vienna, Austria, 3–8 May 2026, EGU26-1600, https://doi.org/10.5194/egusphere-egu26-1600, 2026.

Our dependency on artificial intelligence (AI) is increasing gradually for predicting disaster, allocating resources, emergency response systems, and calculating the impact of the disaster. These new technologies undoubtedly offer unparalleled opportunities to enhance resilience, but their implementation without ethical safety measures could multiply the existing inequalities with humanity. This study makes the case for a paradigm shift in humanitarian engineering toward human-centered AI, with a focus on prioritizing the requirements of frontline communities that are most impacted by climatic extremes. To investigate how design decisions affect equity results, this analysis draws on current developments in climate-resilient infrastructure and AI-driven catastrophe management. Using a policy-oriented perspective, this paper identifies three actionable strategies: mandating equity impact assessments for AI applications in disaster contexts, establishing governance frameworks that include community representation, and incorporating ethical AI training into engineering and public administration curricula. These ideas intend to bring about a convergence of scientific advancement and social justice, with the goal of ensuring that AI enhances human agency rather than diminishing it. Through the incorporation of frontline communities into the process of developing and deploying AI systems, this study will contribute to an approach to catastrophe resilience that is more accountable and inclusive. In conclusion, the article emphasizes the importance of interdisciplinary collaboration among engineers, policymakers, and affected people to develop AI solutions that are not only effective but also compassionate and egalitarian. 

How to cite: Monalisa, S. and Mostafiz, R. B.: Ethical AI for Disaster Resilience: Centering Frontline Communities , EGU General Assembly 2026, Vienna, Austria, 3–8 May 2026, EGU26-22076, https://doi.org/10.5194/egusphere-egu26-22076, 2026.

In this study, a physics-based, performance-oriented framework to estimate the probability of failure of a cross-laminated timber (CLT) shear wall has been proposed. In low-lying coastal regions, residential buildings are becoming more exposed to both the pluvial and fluvial flooding. In previous studies, most structural analysis has been done emphasizing either solely on masonry-wall structures or entire building structures made of wood. In this study, the CLT shear wall has been subjected to flood-induced load. The wall demand is expressed in terms of a combination of hydrostatic and hydrodynamic forces, with the water depth acting as the intensity measure. Structural resistance has been computed at the component level by combining the in-plane and out-of-plane resistance models. Among the in-plane, bracket sliding, and rocking capacities, along with their combination has been considered. Whereas for out-of-plane bending resistance, the bending strength of CLT has been considered. Based on the demand and the resistance value, a limit state function has been formulated. Using a series of crude Monte Carlo simulations, the uncertainties in flood depth that lead to the damage state have been calculated. Overall, the results demonstrate that for all the given water depths, the CLT shear wall can withstand the load and avoid structural failure.

How to cite: Khan, N. M., Kameshwar, S., and Bin Mostafiz, R.: Physics-Based Flood Fragility Modeling of CLT Shear Walls , EGU General Assembly 2026, Vienna, Austria, 3–8 May 2026, EGU26-16181, https://doi.org/10.5194/egusphere-egu26-16181, 2026.

Urban gullies are an emerging geo-hydrological hazard of the Anthropocene, particularly in rapidly urbanizing tropical cities. In the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC), intense rainfall, steep slopes, erodible soils, and uncontrolled urban expansion combine to create highly favorable conditions for the formation and rapid expansion of UGs. Recent national-scale inventories reveal that more than half of Congolese cities are significantly affected, with nearly 3,000 urban gullies mapped. These features can reach tens of meters in depth and width within a few years, causing widespread destruction of housing, roads, and infrastructure, and leading to population displacement, injuries, and fatalities.

Recent analyses estimate that approximately 118,000 people were displaced by urban gullies in the DRC between 2004 and 2023, with displacement rates more than doubling after 2020. Currently, about 3.2 million people live within potential gully expansion zones, a number expected to increase dramatically as urbanization continues. Despite this growing risk, major knowledge gaps persist regarding the socio-economic impacts, rainfall thresholds, and short-term dynamics controlling gully initiation and expansion, severely limiting disaster risk management and early warning capacities.

This project aims to address these gaps through the implementation of a Congolese observatory of urban gullies, focusing on the cities of Kinshasa and Bukavu. Building on previous achievements, the project combines geomorphological research, citizen science, and policy advocacy to provide a proof of concept for an operational observatory.

The project adopts a participatory citizen science approach, engaging at-risk communities as “citizen observers” to collect in-situ data on gully dynamics, rainfall events, and socio-economic impacts. Community information sessions support risk awareness, co-development of data collection tools, and validation of observations. Data are collected using mobile applications, complemented by high-resolution geomorphological monitoring through rain gauge networks, GPS surveys, and drone imagery. These datasets enable improved characterization of gully expansion processes and identification of rainfall thresholds associated with hazardous events.

Beyond data generation, the project emphasizes governance and advocacy by translating scientific results into policy briefs and stakeholder workshops involving communities, authorities, NGOs, and urban planners. The project ultimately seeks to strengthen disaster risk management, inform sustainable urban planning, and demonstrate the feasibility and necessity of a dedicated national observatory for urban gullies in the DRC.

How to cite: Ilombe Mawe, G., Lutete Landu, E., Mugaruka Bibentyo, T., Makanzu Imwangana, F., Nzolang, C., Poesen, J., Dewitte, O., Bielders, C., Vanmaercke, M., and Michellier, C.: Implementation of a Congolese observatory of urban gullies for research, governance, and early warning system, EGU General Assembly 2026, Vienna, Austria, 3–8 May 2026, EGU26-22962, https://doi.org/10.5194/egusphere-egu26-22962, 2026.

Urban gullies (UGs) are an increasingly urgent concern in many cities of the Global South. Rapid and largely unplanned urban expansion, combined with inadequate drainage infrastructure, erodible soils, and intense rainfall, have led to the formation of thousands of large UGs —often several tens of meters wide and deep and extending over hundreds of meters— in cities across the Democratic Republic of the Congo. These gullies cause loss of life, destroy housing and critical infrastructure, and further exacerbate the vulnerability of already marginalized populations. The situation is particularly severe in Kinshasa, where more than 800 UGs have already been recorded, threatening over one million people.

A wide range of initiatives has been implemented to stop UG expansion. These include large-scale engineering interventions led by the state or non-governmental organizations, such as concrete reinforcement of gully heads and canalizing the gully channel. However, many measures are expensive and/or often fail.

Nevertheless, emerging evidence highlights promising strategies for urban gully prevention and control. A key principle is to prevent rainwater from leaving individual parcels by installing water retention structures, as the accumulation of runoff along roads is a primary driver of gully initiation and expansion. A critical requirement for success is that a majority of households actively participate in such initiatives. Improving risk awareness and creating synergies between UG control and water accessibility will therefore be crucial to achieving this.

Here we aim to demonstrate the effectiveness of such a strategy. For this purpose, we installed water retention structures in a representative catchment in Kinshasa affected by UGs. This is done in close collaboration with local stakeholders. By monitoring and studying participation rates as well as the resulting hydrological effects (e.g., through the involvement of local students), we will develop actionable guidelines to this growing problem in Kinshasa and elsewhere, thereby enhancing both urban resilience and water security in vulnerable neighborhoods.

How to cite: Lutete Landu, E., Ilombe Mawe, G., Makanzu Imwangana, F., Makonga, L.-O., Lusolamo Nguizani, D., Luemba Luemba, R., Bielders, C., Michellier, C., Dewitte, O., Poesen, J., and Vanmaercke, M.: Stabilisation of urban gullies by managing rainwater at parcel scale, EGU General Assembly 2026, Vienna, Austria, 3–8 May 2026, EGU26-23167, https://doi.org/10.5194/egusphere-egu26-23167, 2026.

Resilience and sustainability are widely recognized as desirable properties of infrastructure systems.  Although related, they can become conflicting objectives, especially when resources available to enhance them are limited, making trade-offs between short-term resilience and long-term sustainability inevitable. Despite growing needs of increasing both resilience and sustainability, systematic analyses of such trade-offs remain limited.  In this work, we address this gap by developing a stylized, minimalistic stochastic model of system functionality under a sequence of disruptions.  The results reveal the nature of the trade-offs between short-term resilience and long-term sustainability and show that, depending on the effectiveness of investments in each, sub-optimal allocations may arise and should be avoided.  The analysis establishes clear relationships demonstrating how physical system features and investment strategies interplay to influence the nature of such resilience-sustainability trade-offs.

How to cite: Muneepeerakul, R. and Lin, N.: Trade-off between short-term resilience and long-term sustainability in infrastructure systems, EGU General Assembly 2026, Vienna, Austria, 3–8 May 2026, EGU26-13004, https://doi.org/10.5194/egusphere-egu26-13004, 2026.

Urban fire risk in heritage cities threatens lives, livelihoods, and irreplaceable historical monuments. Nepal's heritage cities, rich in cultural landmarks, face acute vulnerability due to dense settlement patterns driven by uncontrolled urbanization. Fragmented data availability prevents stakeholders from implementing effective fire risk mitigation measures at the community level, which intensifies the existing vulnerabilities. In this study, we address this challenge by developing comprehensive data through collaborative public-private partnerships involving multiple stakeholder experts. We propose scalable interventions designed to reduce fire risk while strengthening community resilience in ways that align with heritage preservation objectives. This integrated approach ensures that safety measures protect both people and the cultural assets that define these historic urban centers.

Our study area is Bhaktapur Municipality, a UNESCO World Heritage site rich with traditional wooden architecture. Our approach combines municipal planning data, private building inventories, community knowledge, and emergency response databases for fire hazards. We integrate Analytical Hierarchy Process (AHP) with GIS technology across three domains: hazard factors, vulnerability indicators, and response capacity. We establish public-private partnerships to gain access to previously prepared fire incident datasets while we protect commercial interests. We establish multi-stakeholder data protocols and develop community-centered collection mechanisms that respect local knowledge systems. We leverage real field knowledge from community-level surveys to assess the present scenario and propose upgrades to current practices. We perform dynamic vulnerability assessments that support both emergency planning and heritage conservation. Through weighted overlay analysis, we determine optimized fire hydrant placement for narrow streets that existing firefighting services cannot access. This spatial analysis ensures that infrastructure improvements respect the historic urban fabric while they enhance emergency response capabilities.

We expect collaborative data partnerships to enhance decision-making through three key contributions: (i) bridge critical information gaps that have long hindered effective fire risk management, (ii) support sustainable development, cultural preservation, and community resilience as interconnected goals and (iii) offer scalable lessons for complex urban management challenges in resource-constrained environments. This integrated framework demonstrates how heritage cities can balance safety imperatives with conservation priorities through evidence-based interventions.

How to cite: Ghimire, S., Dangol, S., Khatri, S., Duwal, S., and Bhattarai, Y.: A Framework for Fire Risk Assessment in Heritage Cities through Multi-Stakeholder Data Integration, EGU General Assembly 2026, Vienna, Austria, 3–8 May 2026, EGU26-7909, https://doi.org/10.5194/egusphere-egu26-7909, 2026.

This presentation outlines a multi-faceted framework for addressing climate change adaptation. The methodology is built upon key pillars, including the resilience and integrity of cultural heritage assets, responsible resource use, and effective mitigation of hazard impacts. The success of any adaptation initiative depends on a holistic evaluation that considers not only technical feasibility and cost, but also its broader societal, cultural, community, and economic impacts, including the project's carbon footprint and adherence to principles of the circular economy.
The management of cultural heritage threated by increasing climate change hazards needs a multi-criteria evaluation framework. A structured approach to decision-making ensures that all intervention strategies prioritize conservation, resilience, and long-term sustainability. Criteria and their respective measurement spaces include technical feasibility, cost (which may be incured looking towards the benefit of increasing climate resilience for culturally significant buildings and unbuilt spaces), adherence to regulatory compliance, as well as impact on society and culture. Authenticity, values, and integrity of the heritage building or unbuilt space must be kept. Thus framework emphasizes key climate-specific metrics: hazard impact mitigation, proactive adaptability (such as preventive retrofit), efficient resource use (including materials, time and workforce as they may be depicted in devices for costs calculation), minimizing carbon footprint, and aligning with the circular economy. Actually building retrofit by itself as a reuse strategy illustrates the principles of circular economy itself at its best in the built environment. Such a retrofit project must demonstrate community acceptance (for example by respecting the mental map of landmarks to be kept in case of reconstruction, following Kevin Lynch principles as well as a psychogeograhic parcours), offer educational value, and ensure positive economic impact. 
This strategic management model follows a four-level hierarchy, from the definition of the overarching mission and objectives (Level 1), over problem definition, diagnosis, and stakeholders analysis (Level 2) to defining the challenge and identifying opportunities (Level 3). The highest level of decision-making (Level 4) - implementation - involves setting evaluation criteria, criterion weighting, and decision rules to inform the final choice and design of the intervention. The outcome is an action plan comprising operational and communication (a higher level of participation) means, demonstrated in a model project aiming at long-term resilience and effective climate risk management.

An analysis of various climate change-related events (floods: Elbe/East Germany 2013, Passau 2013, Florence 1966, Bosnia Herzegovina 2025, and winter storms: Lothar 1999, and Atlantic storm in 2013) is included, detailing, along with articles and online exhibitions, for each event:

• Structures: Locations and specific areas affected, such as the Elbe and Bosna rivers, the Black Forest, inner-city forests in Karlsruhe, and the Pena Palace park in Sintra.
• Damage: The impacts range from common effects like flooding of streets, transport disruption, and damage to lower levels of buildings (incl. economic impacts and activity disruption) to specific damage like forest destruction and agricultural land saturation from freaic water.
• Intervention:
  • Short-term/Emergency: Early warning, sandbags, closing roads, removing fallen trees.
  • Long-term: Awareness campaigns, a flood museum (Passau), landscape solutions (river renaturation, changing vegetation to more storm-resilient species in affected forests)

How to cite: Bostenaru Dan, M. and the Climate Adaptation Working Group at ICOMOS Iscarsah: A Structured Framework for Climate-Adaptive Cultural Heritage Management, EGU General Assembly 2026, Vienna, Austria, 3–8 May 2026, EGU26-15909, https://doi.org/10.5194/egusphere-egu26-15909, 2026.

How to cite: Mayacela-Salazar, B. and Torres-Ramirez, R.: Linking paleochannel evidence and physical vulnerability to urban flooding: a spatial analysis in Ibarra, Ecuador , EGU General Assembly 2026, Vienna, Austria, 3–8 May 2026, EGU26-15733, https://doi.org/10.5194/egusphere-egu26-15733, 2026.

Climate change is reshaping hydrological regimes in European transboundary lakes, intensifying pollution pressures and exposing the limits of existing coordination arrangements. Hydrological extremes increasingly interact with persistent and emerging pollutants, creating compound challenges for legal and institutional frameworks developed under more stable conditions. While resilience has become a central concept in water governance research, we still know comparatively little about how specific legal designs support adaptive capacity across borders.

This paper draws on empirical research from a Swiss National Science Foundation–funded project on transboundary water cooperation in Europe. It examines pollution governance in three transboundary lakes—Lac Léman (France–Switzerland), Lake Lugano, and Lake Maggiore (Switzerland–Italy)—where cooperation duties are often framed in flexible or “best-effort” terms and where EU and non-EU legal orders meet. The analysis compares bilateral agreements, joint commissions, regulatory standards, and coordination practices across the three basins.

The empirical material is analyzed through the lens of legal resilience and adaptive capacity, building on work by Ruhl and by Cosens and Soininen. Five systemic properties—reliability, efficiency, scalability, modularity, and evolvability—are used to assess how legal arrangements facilitate coordination under conditions of uncertainty. The paper questions whether, under certain conditions, flexible legal arrangements (such as best effort obligations) can function as enabling elements of systemic resilience in transboundary water governance, allowing incremental adjustment and locally adapted responses to emerging pollutants and hydrological extremes. We conclude by deriving design implications for transboundary lake agreements facing compound hydrological-pollution pressures.

How to cite: Turley, L., Vanackere, F., and Telle, A.: Legal Resilience at the EU / non-EU Interface: Best-Effort Cooperation in Transboundary Lakes, EGU General Assembly 2026, Vienna, Austria, 3–8 May 2026, EGU26-21921, https://doi.org/10.5194/egusphere-egu26-21921, 2026.

Compound drought–heatwave events (CDHEs) are becoming more frequent across several regions at the same time, heightening global climate risks, yet the processes that lead to their synchronized emergence remain poorly understood. Further, to assess how the governing drivers of synchrony have evolved, we employ statistical approaches to quantify the relative contributions of climatic oscillations and anthropogenic warming to CDHE occurrences. In this study, CDHEs are detected using the Blended Dry and Hot Index (BDHI), and their co-occurrence patterns are analyzed through a global complex-network approach that identifies statistically significant teleconnections. Complex network analysis reveals persistent synchronization hubs in the Amazon, West Africa, the Mediterranean, Southeast Asia, and northern Eurasia, highlighting regions where hot–dry extremes tend to cluster in time. Results also indicate that, although ENSO has historically played a major role in widespread CDHE clusters, its influence has weakened considerably in recent decades.  In contrast, anthropogenic warming exhibits a consistently increasing and statistically significant effect, elevating the baseline probability of CDHEs even during weak or neutral ENSO conditions. Overall, our findings demonstrate a climate-system shift toward warming-dominated synchronization dynamics, in which background warming increasingly overrides natural variability. This transition heightens the risks of simultaneous climate shocks across continents, with major implications for disaster preparedness and global food–water security.

How to cite: Varghese, F. C., Saminathan, S., and Mitra, S.: Global Synchronization of Compound Drought and Hot Extremes, EGU General Assembly 2026, Vienna, Austria, 3–8 May 2026, EGU26-643, https://doi.org/10.5194/egusphere-egu26-643, 2026.