Awareness of Natural Hazards in the Context of Climate Change Using Remote Sensing Techniques

Dear Colleagues,

We are witnessing a rise in concerns at an international level about the increase in the frequency and severity of natural disasters, many of them as a consequence of climate change, evidencing the different dimensions in which a disaster can affect people’s well-being.

Since the last decade of the 20th century, the challenge of reducing disaster risk has been addressed through a change in focus: moving from a view linked to the unpredictability and inescapability of their occurrence to considering them as a problem linked to the processes of the development of regions, territorial dynamics, the success of land-use planning instruments, and climate change. Thus, among the main causes of the occurrence of a catastrophe is the inadequate way of implementing disaster risk management in the territory, as well as the lack of awareness and responsibility on the subject on the part of political decision-makers and the community. This risk management involves, among other aspects, the reduction of risk in the face of the occurrence of disasters.

These issues were debated during the third United Nations World Conference held in Sendai, Japan, on 18 March 2015 (Sendai Framework for Disaster Risk Reduction 2015 - 2030). The Sendai Framework can be considered the first milestone that leads to a paradigm shift: prevention and risk management are prioritized instead of crisis management, with the main purpose of preventing loss of life and the economic effects of material losses. Thus, the Framework urges countries, before 2030, to deploy national and local strategies where their main objectives should be 1) to improve the resilience of communities, 2) to increase scientific knowledge and early warning, and 3) to increase the preparedness of the population before disasters. Thus, prevention and governance are the main pillars on which efforts to deal with natural disasters must be based.

This Special Issue aims to include studies particularly relevant which help to assess how the human interventions on the territory (implementation of infrastructures, land-use and land-cover changes, legal or illegal human settlements, underground mining, …) could lead to risk situations in relation to the occurrence of natural hazards, with the main purposes of improving the community resilience and preventing the loss of human lives and material goods. Topics may cover anything from the prior or posteriori evaluation of the impact of the implementation of infrastructures in environments prone to the occurrence of landslide events to the development or improvement of tools/approaches to assess landslide susceptibility and hazard. In addition, multisource data integration (e.g., multispectral, hyperspectral, 3D point clouds, or SAR imagery taken by space, airborne, drone, or terrestrial platforms) or multiscale approaches are welcome.

Articles may address, but are not limited, to the following topics:

• Mass movement detection and mapping;
• Landslide susceptibility mapping;
• Landslide hazard and risk assessments;
• Slope failure monitoring and multi-temporal analysis;
• Development/improvement of tools/approaches;
• Climate change effects on the occurrence of landslides;
• Early warning;
• Community resilience.

Prof. Dr. Diego Di Martire
Prof. Dr. Sandra Buján
Guest Editors

Manuscript Submission Information

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• landslide inventory
• SAR imagery analysis
• 3D point clouds processing
• earth observation imagery
• landslide
• slope failure
• mass movement
• volunteered geographic information
• geographical information system