News

Drawing upon years of experience and research, CNDS fellows are sharing their knowledge and wisdom with the public in efforts to better understand the current Coronavirus pandemic.

Local strategies and policies are key in climate adaptation, although research shows significant barriers to progress. Sweden, often seen as progressive in climate change issues, has struggled in adopting a sufficient local climate adaptation organization. CNDS ​fellow Mikael Granberg (Karlstad University) and his colleague Ann-Catrin Kristianssen (Örebro University) took a deeper look at this issue.

 

CNDS Director, Giuliano Di Baldassarre, receiver of the Plinius Medal 2021 was interviewed by the European Geosciences Union (EGU), and gave his personal take on floods in the Anthropocene.

CNDS fellows Giuliano Di Baldassarre, Maurizio Mazzoleni & Maria Rusca have recently published an article in Ambio on large dams in the U.S, where they show how chicken-and-egg dynamics of water supply & demand can generate lock-in conditions characterized by unsustainable levels of water consumption.

CNDS provided  Early Career Scientists (i.e., PhD students and postdocs) from CNDS partnering universities Uppsala University (UU), Karlstad University (KAU) and Swedish Defence University (FHS)  to apply for funding for interdisciplinary work within natural hazard and disaster science. The following have applied and have been selected to receive funding: Elin Stenfors (Department of Earth Sciences, Uppsala University) and Konstantinos Karagiorgos (Karlstad University).

Natural hazard events provide opportunities for policy change to enhance disaster risk reduction (DRR), yet it remains unclear whether these events actually fulfill this transformative role around the world. In an article in Nature, CNDS fellows Daniel Nohrstedt, Maurizio Mazzoleni, Charles F. Parker & Giuliano Di Baldassarre investigate relationships between the frequency (number of events) and severity (fatalities, economic losses, and affected people) of natural hazards and DRR policy change in 85 countries over eight years.

Cities are increasingly impacted by climate change, driving the need for adaptation and sustainable development. Local and global economic and socio-cultural influence are also driving city redevelopment. This, fundamentally political, development highlights issues of who pays and who gains, who decides and how, and who/what is to be valued. Climate change adaptation has primarily been informed by science, but the adaptation discourse has widened to include the social sciences, subjecting adaptation practices to political analysis and critique. 

Under the leadership of CNDS fellow Lars Nyberg has Formas awarded 3 million Swedish crowns to a three-year project  on developing risk assessment methods for cloudburst damages.

CNDS Director Giuliano Di Baldassare was ranked amongst top 2% of scientists in the world for career-long citation impact according to new citation ranking developed by Stanford University and published in the journal PLoS Biology.

Sweden is often perceived as an exceptional welfare state and among the most advanced nations in terms of welfare service delivery and quality of welfare production and organization. The Swedish welfare state has been characterized by tax-financed and equally distributed healthcare, high-quality and free public education and ambitious social security systems. However, restructuring reforms have resulted in an equally ambitious but highly decentralized, deregulated and liberalized welfare state. 

CNDS PhD candidate Maximilian Wanner recently published preliminary findings from his doctoral project on the drivers of change in national disaster governance under the Hyogo Framework for Action.

Today CNDS Director Giuliano di Baldassare is  being awarded the Thuréus Prize by the Swedish Royal Society of Sciences in Uppsala with the motivation "for his study of floods, in particular the complex relationship between water flows, population dynamics and susceptibility". 

The prize consists of a monetary gift of 75 000 kronor as well as a certificate. 

Giuliano Di Baldassarre, Professor of Hydrology at the Department of Earth Sciences and Director of the Centre for Natural Disaster Science, has recently won two very prestigious scientific awards within just a few days.

CNDS fellow Simon Hollis, Senior Lecturer in Political Science at the Swedish Defence University, has recently published the book "Resilience in the Pacific and the Caribbean: The Local Construction of Disaster Risk Reduction" where he critically examines the global diffusion and local reception of resilience through the implementation of Disaster Risk Reduction (DRR) programmes in Pacific and Caribbean island states.

The Journal of European Public Policy awarded CNDS fellow Charles F. Parker, Thomas Persson and Sten Widmalm with its 2019 Best Paper Prize.

In Bloomberg Opinion CNDS Director Giuliano Di Baldassarre provides some insight regarding the current pandemic drawing upon his academic perspective and the fact that he is an Italian living in Sweden.

How has crisis management in the Swedish municipalities been carried out during the Corona pandemic? This is one of the issues being addressed in a study where CNDS researchers at Karlstad University together with their colleagues at Mid Sweden University are examining which municipalities have activated their crisis management committees and which have not.

The Swedish Foundation for Strategic Environmental Research, Mistra, announced a 60 million SEK funding package to the interdisciplinary research programme Mistra Geopolitics. Uppsala University is one of the core partners in this programme.

When economic conditions are weak, there is a risk that climate change measure are not prioritized. At the same time, interest in sustainable investments is now greater than ever. Can the corona crisis become a catalyst for green technology?

The project CriseIT 2 "Implementing Future Crisis Management Training" has successfully completed its first project year, but much of the foundation for the project was established during the first project effort "CriseIT" where the key insights, tools and methods were identified. CriseIT 2 takes these aspects one step further and maximizes their development potential. Now, CriseIT2 is in an exciting phase where they are testing, refining and further developing tools and the methodology in order to be able to implement an easily accessible, cost-effective and flexible crisis management concept.

In a pandemic caused by a new virus, knowledge uncertainty is very high and it is precisely in this situation that the precautionary principle must be applied. This is the advice given by CNDS fellows Mikael Granberg and Finn Nilsson and their two other colleagues in a debate article in the Swedish daily Svenska Dagbladet.

The European Weather Extremes: Drivers, Predictability and Impacts (EDIPI) project aims to help us better understand the dynamics, predictability and impacts of temperature, precipitation (including drought) and surface wind extremes over Europe. Why does a specific type of weather extreme occur? How can we use this knowledge to better predict it? And finally, what are the likely impacts once it does occur? We will try to answer these questions by combining very different disciplines, from climate science, to statistical mechanics, dynamical systems theory, risk management, agronomy, epidemiology and more.

City planning is entering  a new era and society will need to significantly enhance its use of the subsurface volume below the city landscape. The purpose of the project "SubCity: Future imaginaries of the city subsurface” is to contribute knowledge and solutions for developing Swedish spatial planning so that it creates the conditions to transform towards a sustainable society.

The National Geographic Channel has started a new series "X-Ray Earth" where the latest x-ray techniques are being used to explore the inner layers of Earth. CNDS fellow Valentin Troll (professor at Uppsala University's Department of Earth Sciences) is contributing to the production as an on-site scientist and as Chief Scientific Advisor.

CNDS fellows Charles Parker, Daniel Nohrstedt and Helena Hermansson, together with their colleagues in Canada, Denmark, and Australia, published the article  "Collaborative crisis management: a plausibility probe of core assumptions" in Policy and Society utilizing the Collaborative Governance Databank to empirically explore core theoretical assumptions about collaborative governance in the context of crisis management.

Although the Centre for Societal Risk Research at Karlstad University is part of CNDS, some of their research extends beyond the traditional boundaries of that which typically falls under the umbrella of disaster risk reduction but which is of interest and value for our efforts in understanding social dynamics and how they influence vulnerabilities, perceptions, governance, policies, institutions, and consequently the natural environment . In a new study at the Centre examines how elderly people in Sweden experience risk in regards of the ongoing corona-pandemic, their ability and willingness to handle the situation and their experiences of how mental health is affected by the situation.

CNDS PhD candidate at Karlstad University, Åsa Davidsson published the article "Disasters as an opportunity for improved environmental conditions" in International Journal of Disaster Risk Reduction. Here she presents case studies where disasters provided a window of opportunity for change that included social action with (potentially) positive effects on the environment. 

CNDS fellow Professor Daniel Nohrstedt and colleagues offer insights into the unfolding phenomena in their commentary, which draws on the lessons of the policy sciences literature to understand the dynamics related to COVID-19. They explore the ways in which scientific and technical expertise, emotions, and narratives influence policy decisions and shape relationships among citizens, organizations, and governments. They also discuss varied processes of adaptation and change, including learning, surges in policy responses, alterations in networks (locally and globally), implementing policies across transboundary issues, and assessing policy success and failure. They conclude by identifying understudied aspects of the policy sciences that deserve attention in the pandemic’s aftermath.

CNDS researchers at Karlstad University hosted a group of researchers from the University of West England, University of Gloucestershire, and Linköping University for a two-day workshop with the aim to address doing transdisciplinary research in collaboration with actors outside academia.

The research and collaboration project SPLASH has come to an end. The final project results and achievements were presented at a seminar at Länsförsäkringar's office in Jönköping, where the project had started two years earlier. Around twenty participants from several insurance companies, municipalities, and universities attended the final project seminar.  This two-year project was funded by the Swedish Knowledge Foundation (KK-stiftelse).

Karlstad university is at the forefront in climate and public safety research. In order to enable larger research projects and developed international collaborations, the former CNDS collaborative partner Centre for Climate and Safety (CCS) and Centre for Public Safety (CPS) have now been merged into a new centre: the Centre for Societal Risk Research (CSR). So CNDS now welcomes CSR as our new collaborative partner from Karlstad University.

Professor Rutgersson and Dr. Mårtensson provide some promising news about how the Corona crisis can actually provide new opportunities for the air and environment. For example, there is evidence that air pollution in China decreased by 20-30 percent this February, and satellite images show that the emissions of the poisonous gas nitrogen dioxide decreased throughout Europe.