The next big earthquake may inflict a multi-hazard crisis - Insights from COVID-19, extreme weather and resilience in peripheral cities of Israel

Do first responders and populations perceive risks similarly? A comparative study of seven countries

Introduction

Risk perception illustrates the subjective evaluation of individuals concerning the characteristics, severity, and capacity to cope with potential hazards. Risk perception influences attitudes and actions individuals take to protect themselves from future threats. Risk perceptions might change among different stakeholder groups such as society and first responders. Identifying risk perceptions of stakeholders is essential to establish effective protective measures.

Method

This study investigated the commonalities and diversities in risk perception among first responders and the public, within and between seven European and beyond countries. A self-administered questionnaire was used to gather data from both first responders and civilians. They were asked to assess their risk perception level for five categories of risks (Extreme weather-related events, nature-related events, social disruptions, critical services dependencies, and pandemics).

Results

Using Univariate Analysis of Variance showed disparity concerning both the levels of risk perception between the public and first responders, as well as their relative ranking. For example, concerning extreme weather-related and nature-related events, risk perception levels of the first responders is higher than that of the population in six out of the seven studied countries. In contrast, the population's risk perception is higher compared to the first responders in six out of the seven countries, concerning critical infrastructure dependencies and pandemics.

Discussion

The relative gaps between the first responders versus the population, within each country, vary considerably. Norway for example presents significant differences between the two internal populations concerning all risks (except for extreme weather), while in Sweden, no significant gaps were identified, concerning all five risks.

The Intersection of the COVID-19 Pandemic and the 2021 Heat Dome in Canadian Digital News Media: A Content Analysis

During the 2021 Heat Dome, 619 people in British Columbia died due to the heat. This public health disaster was made worse by the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic. Few studies have explored the intersection of heat with COVID-19, and none in Canada. Considering that climate change is expected to increase the frequency of extreme heat events, it is important to improve our understanding of intersecting public health crises. Thus, this study aimed to explore media-based public health communication in Canada during the COVID-19 pandemic and the 2021 Heat Dome. A qualitative content analysis was conducted on a subset of media articles (n = 520) related to the COVID-19 pandemic which were identified through a previous media analysis on the 2021 Heat Dome (n = 2909). Many of the articles provided conflicting health messages that may have confused the public about which health protective actions to take. The articles also showed how the COVID-19 pandemic may have exacerbated the health impacts of the 2021 Heat Dome, as pandemic-related public health measures may have deterred people away from protecting themselves from heat. This study, which provides novel insight into the prioritization of public health messaging when an extreme heat event occurs concurrently with a pandemic, supports the need for consistent heat health guidance.

Natural multi-hazard risk perception and educational insights among Geography and Tourism students and graduates amid the Covid-19 pandemic

Multi-hazard risk perception is an emerging research topic that has been gaining more and more interest since the beginning of the Covid-19 pandemic, due to the unprecedented interactions between the management practices of the pandemic and of other co-occurring natural hazards, and to the compounded impact of these multi-hazards. This paper aims to investigate the specialization and study level-dependent differences concerning multi-hazard risk perception and hazard-related education insights of future potential specialists in natural hazard-induced risk management and tourism reconstruction. These differences were explored by applying a multi-layer questionnaire on 547 Geography and Tourism students and graduates from two universities in Iași City (Romania) and Novi Sad (Serbia), and performing descriptive and differential statistical analyses. The statistically significant differences that emerged refer to estimations of the impact level of the Covid-19 pandemic and of other natural hazards at different spatial scales and on different socio-economic activities, on the training/career of the respondents, and to the hazard-related education improvements. Up to date, none of the papers in the existing literature integrate both the Covid-19 pandemic and the co-occurrent natural hazards as objects of students' perception, which makes the present study a starting point for such research endeavours.

Gray Measure and Spatial Distribution Exploration of Local Emergency Resilience on Compound Disasters

The complexity and uncertainty of compound disasters highlight the significance of local emergency resilience. This paper puts forward a framework, including the Projection Pursuit Model based on Real-coded Accelerating Genetic Algorithm and the Moran's Index (Moran's I), to measure the local emergency resilience and analyze its spatial distribution. An empirical test is conducted with the case of Hubei Province, China. The results show that: (1) the measurement indices related to infrastructure, material reserves, and resource allocation have a larger weight, while those related to personnel and their practice have a smaller weight. (2) The measurement value of local emergency resilience of sub-provincial regions in Hubei Province is vital in the eastern and weak in the western, and there are apparent east-west segmentation and north-south aggregation characteristics. (3) Although the sub-provincial regions do not show significant spatial correlation, the eastern regions centered on Wuhan are negatively correlated, and the western regions are positively correlated. Furthermore, this study provides theories and methods for local emergency resilience evaluation and spatial correlation exploration, and it has specific guidance recommendations for optimizing local emergency management resource allocation and improving local emergency resilience.

The Variation of b-Value of Earthquakes During COVID-19 Lockdowns: Case Studies from the Cascadia Subduction Zone and New Zealand

During the COVID-19 outbreak that took place in early 2020, restrictions on human activities were imposed by government-mandated lockdowns and stay-at-home orders. In this study, we analyse the impact of reduced anthropogenic activities on the detection of seismic events. We hypothesise and show that with reduced background noise levels due to the COVID-19 lockdowns, low-magnitude earthquakes are more easily detectable. We investigate the magnitudes of earthquakes recorded at the seismometers before and after COVID-19 lockdowns for two regions — Cascadia Subduction Zone and New Zealand. Gutenberg–Richter law, which gives a relationship between the number of earthquakes and their magnitudes (b-value), was applied in these two areas. Our results point to an increase in detection of smaller-magnitude earthquakes, as observed by an increased b-value during the COVID-19 period compared to those obtained in the pre-COVID time periods. Previous studies have shown that changes in b-value of an area over a sustained period of time affect the short-time probabilistic risk assessment. The variability of b-value also gives useful insights into the prevailing stress state of the region, crustal heterogeneity, pore pressure and tectonic setting of the area.

A Bibliometric and Visual Analysis of Global Community Resilience Research

Resilience is an important issue in urban development, and community resilience (CR) is the most typical representative in building urban resilience, which has become the forefront of international resilience research. This paper presents a bibliometric and visual analysis of community resilience research collected from the WoS Core Collection database over the past two decades. H-index, citation frequency, centrality and starting year were adopted to analyze the research objects by bibliometric tools including CiteSpace, VOSviewer, and Gephi. The national and institutional characteristics of macro-geographical distribution and the characteristics of disciplines, journals, authors, and author cooperation of micro-knowledge network distribution were revealed. Finally, the potential research directions of community resilience in the future were discussed. The results show that there are three stages in community resilience research. Seven intellectual bases constitute the research background for community resilience, including social capital mechanism, the evolution of resilience knowledge, earthquake resistance and disaster mitigation, substance abuse, resilient development in rural communities, resilience-building in the least-developed countries, and emergency preparedness. Our analysis shows that the hottest community resilience research topics are the concept of resilience, climate resilience, the social capital mechanism, macro-environment and disaster-reduction policies, and an evaluation index system for community resilience.