Mapping environmental risks: Quantitative and spatial modeling approaches

Abstract

In recent years, there has been a growing application of advanced methods and techniques such as geographical information systems (GIS), remote sensing and spatial analysis methods in research aimed at understanding, analyzing and visualizing environmental risks. Areas of interest are particularly focused around climate change: the increase in the frequency of extreme weather conditions; the impact of natural disasters; the change to human development make the latter even more relevant. Progress in computer hardware and software allows the application of mathematically complex and computationally intensive methods over relatively small timescales. This special issue of the Journal of Maps is devoted to recent innovations and techniques in the exploitation of mapping and geoinformatics in the field of Environmental Risk Assessment.

Keywords:

• environmental risks
• quantitative analysis
• spatial modeling
• GIS

Risk assessment, risk characterization and risk management are the main aspects of a process known as ‘Risk Analysis’. Since this is a multi-discipline domain involving various scientific areas such as geography, Earth and environmental sciences, ecology, engineering, law, economics, sociology and political sciences, this special issue has attracted papers with a wide spectrum of topics in terms of their theoretical background and field of application.

We have adopted the consideration of the Human-Environment-Human chain as a starting point in order to distinguish three types of risk according to their causal characteristics: (a) Environment-to-Human risks which are naturally caused environmental changes that most often jeopardize humans; (b) Human-to-Environment risks which are human-induced risks that cause significant changes in the environment and do not necessarily affect humans, at least in the short term; and (c) Human-to-Environment-to-Human risks which are anthropogenic environmental changes having negative consequences to humans as the result of alterations of the physical environment. Using this framework for Environmental Risk Analysis, the quantification and mapping of risk is a crucial process.

Although the majority of the papers in the special issue cover topics in Europe, there are papers with reference to Asia as well as Africa. In terms of subject areas, maps of flood, seismic and volcanic risk have been presented along with maps of susceptibility assessment and climate. The scale of the maps extends from local/regional to global. We hope that this special issue will be a valuable resource and stimulate ideas for future research projects within the EU's Horizon 2020 framework.

In order to increase awareness of risks to humans from earthquake activity, Hennig (2014) presents an interesting gridded cartogram of the world based on globally significant earthquakes since 2150 BC. The Mediterranean Sea is the center of Hennig's cartograms perhaps because in addition to high seismic activity in the region, event information may be better documented historically compared to other areas of the planet. Chalkias, Papanastassiou, Karymbalis, and Chalkias (2014b) confirm that Greece is an area with extreme earthquake activity in recent decades. Their detailed national scale map of seismic intensity highlights that a large population of the country reside in areas at risk of heavy damage should an earthquake occur.

Further Environment-to-Human risks are documented by Chueca Cía, Julián Andrés, and Montañés Magallón (2014) who present an avalanche susceptibility map for the Formigal-Peyreget area, located in the Central Spanish and French Pyrenees, while Chalkias, Kalogirou, and Ferentinou (2014a) present a landslide susceptibility map for the Peloponnese peninsula in South Greece. The latter uses advanced geographically weighted regression (GWR) in order to better estimate the factors affecting the occurrence of a landslide while the former apply standard multi-criteria analysis. The former methodology has also been employed by Martínez-Graña, Goy, and Zazo Cardeña (2014) in order to produce a ground movement map based on susceptibility and hazard maps in Salamanca, Spain. Rousi, Mimis, Stamou, and Anagnostopoulou (2014) use advanced spatial analysis methods in order to classify the synoptic circulation over Europe in contributing to a better understanding of the climatic variability over an area during winter.

Alberico and Petrosino (2014) compare the spatial distribution of volcanic hazard zones to the temporal evolution of population and urban development at Ischia Island in Southern Italy, aiming to provide a valuable tool in order to support sustainable territorial planning. Volcanic hazard affecting La Réunion Island in the Indian Ocean has also been presented by Saint-Marc, Davoine, and Villanova-Oliver (2014). However, the focus of the latter paper is on how to better visualize annual data on lava flows and their outlined surface footprints in a single map.

A significant number of papers submitted to this special issue refer to flooding and its consequences to local communities. Balica, Dinh, Popescu, Vo, and Pham (2014) present district maps of current (2000) and future (2050) vulnerability to floods in the Vietnamese Mekong Delta in an attempt to assist decision makers who need to take measures in order to reduce and mitigate flood impact in the area. Kienberger (2014) presents maps of flood hazard risk based on the participatory mapping of the local community in the District of Búzi, Mozambique. Visser (2014) investigate the urban development of Worcester, UK, over time in relation to the location of recorded pluvial flood incidents raising concerns about the quality of the most recent urban development.

The papers illustrate the power of maps to summarize and communicate research results to policy makers and the scientific community in the field of environmental risk. There are several cases where the map also encapsulates the added value of advanced quantitative methods in analyzing geographical data.

It is important to acknowledge that the motivation for this special issue came from several interesting papers related to environmental risk presented at the 17th European Colloquium on Quantitative and Theoretical Geography (http://gisc.gr/ecqtg11) held in Athens 2–5 September 2011. We would like to thank all authors for submitting their papers to this special issue and for patiently reviewing them based on detailed peer-review comments. The success of this special issue would have been impossible without the valuable help of the reviewers to whom we would like to express our sincere gratitude. We hope that they continue supporting the Journal of Maps by submitting their research for publication and/or reviewing other papers in the future. Finally, we would like to thank Dr. Mike Smith and Dr. Jeremy Porter for accepting our proposal for this special issue, and their hard work and advice that made it possible to complete the task.