Become a member
The core of ecorisQ is made of its members. By joining ecorisQ you will expand your professional network and profit from transparent tools in the field of natural hazard risks. Being an ecorisQ member demonstrates that you are willing to increase the transparancy and reproducibility of natural hazard analyses and that you promote sustainable protection against natural hazards.
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November 2013: Typhoon Haiyan, 'apocalyptic’ storm flood in Sardinia, tornadoes in the Midwest of the US, heavy flooding in Baghdad, rare flooding in Saudi Arabia. The death toll from one of the strongest storms that ravaged the Philippines reached several thousands. Although the death tolls of the other mentioned events related to extreme weather are much lower, they contribute to a more intensive discussion on climate change and natural hazard related disasters. The facts regarding the losses due to such disasters are clear: there is an increasing trend.
Several factors play a role: the damage potential is increasing (increasing population, more intense use of increasingly dense infrastructure, etc.), building space in areas where natural hazards can be avoided is decreasing and lastly the number of extreme events related to climate change is potentially increasing. The latter can only be proved by long term data series, which for the moment are not available. At least not with the same recording intensity - thanks to the communication means we have today, almost each single falling rock or sliding slope is being described and photographed. What is true, however, is that the global climate is changing, and beacuse of that, it is very likely that we will have to deal with changing patterns and changing intensities of natural events, as well as with an event frequency that will not decrease. In their 2013 report, the Global Facility for Disaster Risk Reduction and Recovery (GFDRR) and the World Bank conclude in that it is important to ultimately strengthen disaster resilient development. This includes coordinating institutions, identifying risk hot spots, which means defining hazard scenarios and analysing the risk, defining risk reduction measures, being prepared for extreme events, organising financial and social protection, and promoting resilient reconstruction. Clear progress has been made, but many challenges remain. Click here for more information.
Below: Losses due to catastrophes related to natural hazards (NatCat - MunichRe)
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On 9 October 1963, trees and rocks were falling into the reservoir behind the Vajont dam in the Italian Alps at the location where a landslide was predicted. A massive landslide of about 250 million m^2 of earth, rock and trees fell later that day into the reservoir. This caused the displacement of 50 million m^2 of water which overtopped the dam. The flash flood in the Piave valley destroyed the villages of Longarone, Pirago, Rivalta, Villanova and Faè, killing around 2'000 people. The dam itself was largely undamaged. On 8-10 October the Vajont 2013 conference was organised to commemorate the 50th anniversary of the catastrophic landslide and to discuss advances in engineering geology of giant landslides.
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Welcome on the new website of ecorisQ. To increase the visibility of our network and to facilitate networking between our members, ours website has been completely redeveloped. This new website allows to easily acces the tools ecorisQ provides, thanks to the members-only section. This new website accompanies the transition of ecorisQ from being a small association that provided rockfall analysis tools to an international association of professionals working on natural hazard risk management.
The latter means that ecorisQ continues to provide tools to the practice - it will even increase the offer steadily. In addition, ecorisQ aims to become an international platform for a fruitful and profitable exchange between members from the field of consultancy, policy-making and research in natural hazard risk management. In other words, ecorisQ will help initiating projects between members, ecorisQ will organise training courses for professionals, ecorisQ provides relevant information and documentation and ecorisQ will transform problems from the practice into research questions. All this with two goals in mind: to promote sustainable protection against natural hazard risks and to increase the transparancy and reproducibility of natural hazard analyses.
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From time to time, extremely instructive films on natural hazard risks appear on the internet, how horrible they sometimes might be though. An impressive example is this movie showing a rockfall in Taiwan in August 2013. Such movies help to actually see the behaviour of large rocks impacting an asphalt road. Such observations are rare and help to improve models that are used to predict the runout distance and energies of large falling rocks. In the beginning of this movie, one can also see the rock mass detaching in the release zone (upper centre in the movie frame after 0:03 seconds).
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Rockyfor3D allows to simulate the rockfall on roads and comparison of the risk in a situation with and without protective measures such as nets and forest. This provides all the infomation needed to conduct cost-benefit studies of protective measures. How to quantify the risk is explained in a documentation of the Swiss Federal roads office (available in German, French, Italian and English). Different case studies in Switzerland, France and Austria show that a protection forest along main roads easily add up to 1000 $ per year per ha.
