Disaster preparedness is critical for reducing potential impact. This paper contributes to current knowledge of disaster preparedness using representative national sample data from China, which faces high earthquake risks in many areas of the country. The adoption of earthquake preparedness activities by the general public, including five indicators of material preparedness and five indicators of awareness preparedness, were surveyed and 3245 respondents from all 31 provinces of Mainland China participated in the survey.

An analysis was made of the loss of life directly caused by Hurricane Harvey. Information was collected for 70 fatalities that occurred directly due to the event. Most of the fatalities occurred in the greater Houston area, which was most severely affected by extreme rainfall and heavy flooding. The majority of fatalities in this area were recovered outside the designated 100- and 500-year flood zones. Most fatalities occurred due to drowning (81%), particularly in and around vehicles.

In order to make a scientific emergency strategic decision after an earthquake, casualties need to be estimated rapidly. Asia is the most earthquake-prone continent in the world. In this paper, by spatial statistic and regressive analysis of historical Asian earthquake data from 1990 to 2012, vulnerability curves portraying the empirical relationship between the magnitude of an earthquake event and the casualty rate caused by it were created for countries of six-groups and the Quick Assessment Model of Earthquake Casualties for Asia (QAMECA) was developed.

This paper reports the seismic vulnerability of vernacular Newari buildings based on the damage observations during four major earthquakes (1934, 1988, 2011 and 2015) that struck Bhaktapur city. Some specific features that contributed to collapse prevention in traditional masonry buildings are also highlighted in this paper. In this paper, we have outlined the insights of each earthquake using forensic interpretations and the recommendations by various researchers after 1934 and 1988 earthquakes are compared in terms of their implementation.

Landslide displacement prediction is one of the focuses of landslide research. In this paper, time series analysis was used to decompose the cumulative displacement of landslide into a trend component and a periodic component. Then LSSVM model and GA were used to predict landslide displacement. The results show that the GA-LSSVM model can be effectively used to predict landslide displacement and reflect the corresponding relationships between the major influencing factors and the displacement.

Research of glacial lake outburst floods (GLOFs) – specific low frequency, high magnitude floods originating in glacial lakes, including jokulhlaups – is well justified in the context of glacier ice loss and glacial lake evolution in glacierised areas all over the world. Increasing GLOF research activities, which are documented by the increasing number of published research items, have been observed in the past few decades; however, a comprehensive insight into the GLOF research community, its global bibliometrics, geographies and trends in research is missing.

With the increased frequency of shipping activities, navigation safety has become a major concern, especially when economic losses, human casualties and environmental issues are considered. As a contributing factor, the sea state plays a significant role in shipping safety. However, the types of dangerous sea states that trigger serious shipping accidents are not well understood. To address this issue, we analyzed the sea state characteristics during ship accidents that occurred in poor weather or heavy seas based on a 10-year ship accident dataset.

Changes in the abundance and area of mountain lakes in the Djungarskiy (Jetysu) Alatau between 2002 and 2014 were investigated using Landsat imagery. The number of lakes increased by 6.2 % from 599 to 636 with a growth rate of 0.51 % a−1. The combined areas were 16.26 ± 0.85 to 17.35 ± 0.92 km2 respectively and the overall change was within the uncertainty of measurements. Fifty lakes, whose potential outburst can damage existing infrastructure, were identified.

This study illustrates the development and implementation of a novel rapid response storm impact survey that combined the use of drone based aerial photogrammetry with numerical modeling.  The comprehensive approach employed in this pilot case study was conducted on the Emilia-Romagna coast (Italy), in the immediate aftermath of an extreme storm event that impacted the shoreline on the 5th-6th February 2015 called the “Saint Agatha Storm”.