Control of natural hazard events through emergency landscaping

Eli Lazarus 

Humans reshape the surface of the Earth through efforts to protect people and places from natural hazards. While some hazard defences, such as river levees, are permanent infrastructure, other measures, such as wildfire fighting, are responsive: they occur while a hazard event is in progress, actively intervening in its behaviour to mitigate its impact. Deliberate, concurrent, mitigating interventions in the physical processes of a natural hazard event are here termed "emergency landscaping". When intervention actions are concurrent with an evolving natural hazard event, hazard and intervention behaviours may become mechanistically coupled, such that each changes as a function of the other. Despite their ubiquity across a variety of natural hazard types and settings, emergency landscaping is missing from process-based, predictive numerical models of natural hazard events that inform operational decision-making. Improving prediction of natural hazard impacts is fundamental to reducing disaster risk. For hazard events that trigger intervention, eliding the effects of emergency landscaping may contribute to persistent disparities between model prediction and observation. Addressing emergency landscaping as a fundamental physical process in human-altered environments opens new avenues of interdisciplinary research into the dynamics of natural hazards.