Hazard interactions are becoming more frequent and consequential globally. Climate warming is increasing the chances of compound and cascading climate hazards, including extreme rainfall, storms, heat, and droughts. Risks can become further intensified when they interact with inland/coastal flooding, landslides, earthquakes, tsunamis, and volcanic eruptions. When hazards interrelate, impacts on people and infrastructure can exceed extremes, deepen disruption and slow recovery.
While understanding of compounding and cascading disasters has advanced, these events continue to expose weaknesses in how risks are communicated, understood, and acted upon. Forecasts, probability statements, impact matrices and alerts are organised around single hazards - failing to represent interactions, overlapping impacts, evolving conditions, and spatiotemporal dependencies. Although many sectors have developed capabilities to assess multi-hazard impacts, impact-based operations and communications are not universally applied, requiring stronger coordination of user-centred practices.
The challenge, therefore, lies in producing and translating knowledge to practice in ways that can enable greater understanding and action. Communication, a key determinant of behavioural response during disasters, remains a bottleneck in effective risk reduction. The gap between hazard forecasts and loss-minimising action lies in the failure to account for how warnings are received, understood, and acted upon. Alerts especially are a critical link in the chain of rapid response and can fail in complex scenarios of multi-hazards and divided attention.
This session focuses on communication and alerting as central components of multi-hazard risk management, with the aim of exploring how interacting, compounding, and cascading hazards can be represented to make complex risk information more accessible, understandable, and practical for decision-making. We welcome contributions examining communication across the full chain - technological advances in alerting, risk assessment, trust and sense making to scientific underpinning of the local and community-level actionability. We encourage submissions that examine a) how uncertainty in the timing of cascading hazards can be communicated, b) how evolving impacts can be conveyed when the consequences of one event alter subsequent hazards, and c) how multi-hazard warnings and alerts can be made coherent and actionable while reflecting interconnected risks.