Center for Climate Change and Transformation - Climate and Disaster Risk

Climate and Disaster Risk

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The Climate and Disaster Risk (CDR) research group pursues the understanding and modeling of impacts and risks, including Climate Change, related to Natural Hazards in mountainous regions under non-stationary conditions at different spatial and temporal scales, with a transdisciplinary, integrated approach. Given the complexity of this challenge, the CDR unit comprises researchers with expertise ranging from physics, data science and geospatial processing to environmental management, sociology, and anthropology. The activities are organized along four main research lines: climate services, natural hazards, risk assessment and risk governance.

Climate Services

Development and provision of enhanced and consistent climate information in order to support projects and the other research lines. This includes the enhanced characterization of key climate extremes for mountain regions by combining different types of data (e.g. climate data, remote and in-situ observations), and improving the integration of climate information into impact and risk assessment processing chains.

Natural Hazards

This research line aims at advancing and harmonizing the detection, characterization and prediction of mass wasting in mountains at multiple spatial and temporal scales, with a combination of statistical approaches in combination with remote sensing data.

Risk Assessment

This branch of research aims at improving (climate) risk assessment and risk analysis as a basis for adaptation and prevention, efficiently harmonizing Disaster Risk Reduction and Climate Change Adaptation. The Risk Assessment research line also aims at leveraging the outcomes of the other three research lines to achieve a balanced integration of quantitative and qualitative approaches in a transdisciplinary framework.

Risk Governance

The risk governance research line aims at understanding and analyzing multifaceted aspects of the governance of climate and disaster risk, both in theoretical and in applied terms with the goal of improving risk knowledge and risk management. In our current work we analyze and assess community resilience and risk perception as well as risk communication with the aim of inclusive and effective risk governance integration. In our projects we use quantitative and qualitative social science methods such as questionnaires, interviews, workshops, focused ethnography and focus groups.