A collection of interesting links to articles and sources of information related to natural hazards:

Mega cities often receive all the attention when it comes to earthquake risk reduction activities, but what about rural communities living in seismically active areas? As the recent earthquakes in Kashmir, Pakistan and Sichuan, China have shown, rural populations are vulnerable not only to the shaking but also the secondary hazards associated with earthquake events. In this blog post series, Katie Oven and Nick Rosser summarise a scoping study funded by the NERC and ESRC which focuses on rural communities specifically and explores how science and local knowledge can be combined to build resilience at the local level.

In the afternoon of Day 2 I decided to focus more on the human / vulnerability side of natural hazards, and went to two sessions on Social Sciences in Natural Hazards Research.  First up was Katie Oven from Durham, with a number of co-authors , who talked about landslide hazards in Nepal .  Now I was the principal supervisor of this research, but I am going to write about it …

Here are my views of the Sendai landslide conference. The meeting was entitled “The First World Landslide Forum Satellite Conference”, with the theme of “Management of Landslide Hazard in the Asia-Pacific Region”. There were over 200 delegates from more than 30 countries, with many (but not all) Asia Pacific countries represented. The first memorable contribution was the short but sweet keynote by Alexander Strom. It is being argued by some, …

As I sit in Terminal 5 at Heathrow, enduring an interminable wait for a flight to Newcastle, I have started to reflect upon the International Symposium on Landslides and Engineered Slopes, and upon the state of landslide science in general. First, the conference conveners should be congratulated for a well-organised meeting. The venue (the Shaanxi Guest House in Xian) was quite good, although I was quite glad that we chose …

I thought it would be interesting to provide some details of three blogs / sites that I have come across recently, and which I have found useful: Save the hills: savethehills.blogspot.com. I have posted about this site before, but as we come into the monsoon rainfall season in north India it is worth highlighting again. Save the hills is a community blog focused on drawing attention to the appalling losses …