Decision Support for Emergency Response to Multiple Natural Hazards : CHALLENGES AND NEEDS

Abstract: Global warming exceeding 1.5°C above pre-industrial levels will very likely lead to unavoidable increases of several climate hazards in the coming decades. Climate change phenomena can increase the risk of several extreme weather events, leading to risks of what is commonly considered as natural hazards, for instance landslides and forest fires. These chains or networks of events are termed natural multi-hazards or compound natural events, referring to a primary event or a driver that directly triggers or increases the probability of one or more secondary events by changing the environment. The very likely increase of single and compound natural hazards due to climate change require increased attention since it may imply new challenges to emergency response systems and new threats to society. Especially, how emergency response systems can prepare for and respond to these hazards by using knowledge of the interactions between different natural events.   The purpose of this thesis is to increase the knowledge on interactions between natural hazards, investigate how multiple natural hazards lead to challenges for emergency response systems, and how these challenges can be addressed. The purpose can be further divided into three objectives: (i) to identify relevant multiple natural hazards in a Swedish context, (ii) to identify planning and decision-making challenges these hazards may imply for emergency response systems, and (iii) to develop a decision support tool addressing one of these challenges.  The objectives have been addressed in three sub-studies, one for each of the objectives, leading to the production of four papers. The first sub-study focused on the first objective and resulted in the construction of a national natural hazard interaction framework for Sweden, which is presented in Paper 1. The second sub-study focused on the second objective, leading to the identification of needs for information, planning, and decision support systems in the Swedish emergency response system. The results from this study are presented in Paper 2 and 3. The third and last sub-study focused on the development of a decision support tool addressing one of the needs identified in the second sub-study. The sub-study led to the development of an optimization model for resource preparedness location planning, presented in Paper 4.  This thesis contributes to the emergency management field, both scientifically and practically. The scientific contributions are the development of a national natural hazard interactions framework and a resource preparedness location model for wildfires, both filling gaps in the current knowledge. Also, the thesis contributes scientifically through the alternative applications of theory, which can inform the research community in future studies. The natural hazard interaction framework and the resource preparedness location model for wildfires are also considered practical contributions. The former can support the extension of regional and local risk and vulnerability analyses to also include multiple natural hazards, while the latter sheds light on the potential of optimization-based decision support tools to increase preparedness to natural hazards.