News

In 2010 efforts initiated by senior fellows from Uppsala University, Swedish National Defence College (today, Swedish Defence University), and Karlstad University under the coordination of Professor Emeritus Sven Halldin of Uppsala University lay the foundation of CNDS. On 8 January 2020, the Centre of Natural Hazards and Disaster Science (CNDS) celebrates its 10^th anniversary.  A series of events have been planned throughout the year to celebrate this occasion. 

CNDS is now providing an opportunity for Early Career Scientists (PhD students and postdocs from CNDS partnering universities Uppsala University, Karlstad University and Swedish Defence University) to apply for funding for interdisciplinary work within natural hazard and disaster science.

CNDS fellow Mikael Granberg together with his international colleagues examine more closely the idea that climate change adaptation is best leveraged at the local scale is a well- institutionalized script in both research and formal governance. 

CNDS fellow Anna Rutgersson together with her collegues Venugopal Thandlam and Hasibur Rahaman look into the recent tsunami in Indonesia and the factors leading to the mass casualties. They also examine the failure of the early warning systems, methods, and technologies in an attempt to improve future early warning systems designed to mitigate the loss of lives and property against impending disasters. This paper is timely as Indonesia has seen one of the worst tsunamis in recent years and such disasters are continuous threats for the communities. Hence, the authors stress the importance of improving and strengthening the existing early warning systems.

How can we improve cross-disciplinary research environments? 

CNDS fellows Malin Mobjörk, Mikael Granberg, Magnus Johansson together with Camilla Berglund (Örebro University) investigated this and published a report on their findings.

Social inequalities have consequences for the everyday lives of women and girls where power relations, institutional and socio-cultural practices make them disadvantaged in terms of disaster preparedness and experience.

Turkey today is going through possibly the most turbulent period in its history, with major consequences both nationally and internationally. The country looks dramatically different from the Republic founded by Atatürk in 1923. The pace of change has been rapid and fundamental, with core interlinked changes in ruling institutions, political culture, political economy, and society. 

We design our infrastructures, such as bridges, to withstand catastrophic but infrequent events, like floods. Can we use similar reasoning to design our cropping systems? Researchers at SLU and Uppsala University recently received funds from Formas, for a project to support the adaptation of agriculture to climatic extremes. The project will not only take into account the crops, cropping options and weather conditions, but also the human dimension – the farmers’ risk attitude and their decision making under uncertainty.

What role does climate change play in civil unrest?

When the climate changes, it affects nature, animals, and humans.

Based on unique survey data and interviews in nineteen EU member states, CNDS researcher Charles Parker, together with his colleagues Thomas Persson and Sten Widmalm, explored the challenges the EU and its member states face in order to achieve more effective cooperation in the quest to better protect its citizens, namely in the critical field of civil protection.

The Centre for Climate and Safety, CCS, at Karlstad University (which is part of the CNDS research collaboration) invites you to a seminar day on the 4th of September on the theme Modelling of societal exposure and vulnerability connected to natural hazards. Speakers will be Jesse Rozelle and Casey Zusak from the Federal Emergency Management Agency in USA and Daniel Knös from JLT Re.

Sustainable management of natural resources requires knowledge of complex dependencies between societies and ecological systems. A new study in Nature Sustainability identifies what these dependencies are, how they arise, and what the consequences are for sustainable management. "The study contributes to our understanding of how societies interact with ecosystems, which in turn can add new insights to research on disaster risk reduction," says Daniel Nohrstedt - associate professor at the Department of Political Science, research coordinator for CNDS and one of the researchers behind the study.

Experiences from using Riskville as a pedagogical model has proven to be a good starting point for introducing and discussing the connection between urban planning and risk management. CNDS researchers at the Centre for Climate and Safety (CCS at Karlstad University) are happy to announce that these experiences have been documented and published in scientific article.

Daniel Nohrstedt, Charles Parker, Giuliano Di Baldassarre and Maurizio Mazzoleni have been awarded a 3-year grant of 4.4 million SEK for their research project The Transformative Potential of Extreme Weather Events (TRAMPOLINE).  The purpose of the project is to investigate extreme hazard events as potential triggers for changes in DRR policy and development.

The theme of this year's conference is 'Nature, Society and Scale' and includes interdisciplinary panels that reflect threshold concepts in relation to risk, disasters, crises and emergencies as well as the theoretical and methodological implications of the different disciplinary approaches, interventions, and contexts. 

An international team of drought scientists show that while many dams and reservoirs are built, or expanded, to alleviate droughts and water shortages, they can paradoxically contribute to make them worse. The study is published in Nature Sustainability. The research team behind the new study was led by professor Giuliano Di Baldassarre, Director of CNDS.

While many dams and reservoirs aim to alleviate droughts and water shortages, they can paradoxically make them worse.

This article utilizes survey data from civil protection agencies in 17 EU member states to shed light on the factors that promote national and EU-level effectiveness in civil protection and crisis management. The study found both the extent to which a national civil protection agency is organized hierarchically and adheres to a rule governed structure and the extent to which the agency scores highly with regards to a trust-based, professional culture are significantly related to the degree to which civil protection practitioners will value national and EU-level civil protection institutions. 

This year's event, hosted by the Centre for Climate and Safety in Karlstad,  focused on how we can be better at utilizing data, research and experiences in our efforts to deal with the damages and losses associated with disasters.

The event was co-organized by the Department of Earth Sciences and the Centre of Natural Hazards and Disaster Science (CNDS), and it was well attended with more than 50 participants. The workshop focused on multi-hazards, compound events and cascading effects, which are gaining increasing attention in the natural hazards community.

Together with seven other experts, CNDS fellow Christine Wamsler wrote an article for DN DEBATT raising the issue of the need to reform Swedish water governance and management in light of the newly proposed national climate adaptation strategy.

Several CNDS fellows, who research various aspects of water, contributed to a research seminar commemorating World Water Day. Drawing upon their different academic disciplines and competencies, they were able to present various perspectives in an effort to provide a more comprehensive picture of the complex issue of water.

The Knowledge Foundation (Stiftelsen för kunskaps- och kompetensutveckling) has allocated SEK 3.4 million to this interdisciplinary research project on disaster modeling, focusing on flood risks.

CNDS fellows Monika Rydstedt Nyman and Magnus Johansson are co-authors of a new article on lesson learning.