Abstract: Climate change and urban growth are intensifying natural hazard risks to infrastructure and communities. The dynamic interplay between built, natural, and social systems and the potential amplification of impacts due to hazard interactions pose significant challenges in assessing urban resilience. Current tools for assessing the performance of the built environment under future multi-hazard conditions are inadequate, often overlooking compounding and cascading impacts caused by hazard interactions and system interdependencies or focusing on narrow dimensions of impact (physical damage and resulting financial losses).

This talk will discuss challenges and opportunities in dynamic catastrophe risk modeling to support people-centered decision-making under deep uncertainty. It will highlight recent advances, including 1) the use of urban growth modeling to estimate the uncertain future expansion of urban areas and their exposure to natural hazards; 2) a computational framework to efficiently simulate multi-hazard event sets and asses lifecycle consequences of deteriorating engineering systems, appropriately accounting for hazard interactions and their cumulative effects on the system’s performance; 3) approaches for identifying and quantifying disaster impact metrics tailored to the specific context and needs of marginalized communities.

These insights aim to aid in formulating robust mitigation strategies and policies under various climate and societal development scenarios.

Short Bio

Carmine Galasso is a Professor of Catastrophe Risk Engineering in the University College London (UCL)’s Department of Civil, Environmental & Geomatic Engineering (CEGE), UK, and a Visiting Professor at The University of British Columbia, Vancouver, Canada. His research focuses on catastrophe risk modeling and disaster risk reduction. He investigates risks to building portfolios and infrastructure exposed to multiple natural hazards, including earthquakes, typhoons, and floods, with particular emphasis on low-income countries and community assets. Carmine has authored >250 peer-reviewed articles; his research (>£5M as a PI) is funded by the UK Research Councils, the European Commission, the British Council, the World Bank and its Global Facility for Disaster Reduction and Recovery, and the Willis Research Network, among others. He is the Editor-in-Chief for the International Journal of Disaster Risk Reduction; a Handling Editor for the Journal of Earthquake Engineering and Nature Communications Engineering; and one of the Founders and the Executive Editor for Operations for Seismica, a new community-driven Diamond Open Access journal publishing peer-reviewed research in seismology and earthquake science and engineering.