The speech will mainly concentrate on three parts: the introduction of the situation of disaster emergencymapping, the current research hotspots and the development trends of cartography for emergency and disaster management.

The overall situation part: Firstly, starting from the impact of disasters and their management needs, based on the current research ”the body of knowledge for cartography”, it will introduce the classification of disaster and emergency management mapping based on disaster types, disaster management processes, spatial dimensions and spatial temporal scales.

As the current research hotspots, it will mainly involve the following aspects: big data-driven disaster emergency mapping, dynamic simulation of disaster processes, user-centered map design and implementation and disaster scenarios and digital twins.

Facing the development trends, it will explore new methods and ideas driven by new technologies such as artificial intelligence, as well as the design and implementation of disaster narrative maps based on the coupling of nature, humanity, and memory for long-term disaster prevention and disaster education.

National, cross-border, international, and global actions in all phases of disaster management are in due need of technical, organizational, and legal standards that allow for the required cross-organizational and cross-cultural harmonization.
While first international regulations on transnational information flow and processes have already been implemented successfully (transnationally, European, globally) in other domains for years (Environment, Geoinformation, etc.) and furthermore, overarching regulations already have been decided upon (European Data Act, Interoperable Europe Act etc.), implementation in the RISK domains still lack the concepts of how to approach the associated complexity, encourage and promote the elaboration of lighthouse realizations, discuss and make available suitable Testbeds, and mobilize the adequate workforce to achieve Facet Components that support data, information and workflow in predefined achievable timeframes.
This side event is open for international experts to exchange their experiences and opinions. RIMMA2025 Participants who are less experienced but interested in the Digital Future of RISK Information Management are also welcome to join.

The session covers examples of remote sensing applications in disaster and risk management. A special focus is laid on rapid mapping in the aftermath of a natural hazard event to get a situational overview for interventions.

What makes a natural hazard warning useful? How can we best depict natural hazards? What motivates people to protect themselves from natural hazards better? What is valued most by different target groups regarding natural hazard information? How shall we address and communicate uncertainties in natural hazard forecasts and warnings? And how can we best measure the social impact/effect of our warning in real life? These are all relevant questions to consider when making natural hazard information more understandable, accessible, practical, and helpful. We invite session researchers and practitioners to share their findings and experiences in this field.

Session II will take place on Wednesday, 29 January 2025 from 11:00 am to 12:30 pm, Room A-122.

What makes a natural hazard warning useful? How can we best depict natural hazards? What motivates people to protect themselves from natural hazards better? What is valued most by different target groups regarding natural hazard information? How shall we address and communicate uncertainties in natural hazard forecasts and warnings? And how can we best measure the social impact/effect of our warning in real life? These are all relevant questions to consider when making natural hazard information more understandable, accessible, practical, and helpful. We invite session researchers and practitioners to share their findings and experiences in this field.

This session explores innovative approaches to understanding and mitigating environmental hazards affecting forests, forest-adjacent communities, and infrastructure. Topics include wildfire prediction, flood risk, drought impacts, warning systems, and forest damage drivers, showcasing data-driven strategies and modeling techniques for effective hazard identification, risk management, and resilience-building in the face of climate change and natural disasters.

The United Nations SENDAI framework enforces the requirements for coherence and synergies for significant improvements in planning, operational response and recovery. Information governance is needed to promote medium- and long-term cross-domain and cross-organizational national and international implementations for all phases of disaster management, especially in crisis and emergency management. This session offers many experiences applying advanced information management principles to best support societal, natural, technical, inclusive, humanistic and ethical aspects in the RISKs domains.

This session deals with analysing the economic and insured losses and assessing the effectiveness of prevention and early warning to the weather extreme "Bernd" of 2021. In a comparative study between the three countries, Germany, Austria and Switzerland, it has been analysed whether and how the different levels of damage caused by extreme weather (a combined heavy rain-runoff, floods and hail storm event) can be attributed to meteorological, geomorphological, technical and organisational characteristics of the catastrophe management. The preventive effect of protective and early warning measures was studied in the Ahr Valley, the Eastern Alps (Upper Bavaria and Salzburg) and the Swiss canton of Lucerne in detailed field studies. In addition to a comprehensive literature review, interviews with experts and local simulations were carried out (and could be reproduced "on demand" in the session for stronger interaction with the audience). We would like to discuss among the panellists and with the audience on: 

• (1) The opportunities for regional heavy rain strategies, the international state and the barriers to implementation
• (2) How precipitation scenarios of the future could account for climate change and also include nature-based solutions (land protection; run-off infiltration strategies)
• (3) Ways to strengthen local risk awareness and private precautions
• (4) The concept of integrated catastrophe management (i.e. prevention, crisis intervention and insurance) and its benefits in the areas of early warning and financial management of natural disasters.

The subjects will be discussed beyond the findings of the comparative study and include European and international perspectives. National and international interested parties represent the target group, including practitioners, experts, and politicians.

The United Nations SENDAI framework enforces the requirements for coherence and synergies for significant improvements in planning, operational response and recovery. Information governance is needed to promote medium- and long-term cross-domain and cross-organizational national and international implementations for all phases of disaster management, especially in crisis and emergency management. This session offers many experiences applying advanced information management principles to best support societal, natural, technical, inclusive, humanistic and ethical aspects in the RISKs domains.

This talk summarizes the experience gained through the collaborative work of many involved people at MeteoSwiss and the World Meteorological Organization (WMO) Secretariat, together with humanitarian actors.

Extreme hydrological, meteorological and climatological events affect livelihoods and lives all over the globe. Enabling access to authoritative information about these events is vital in supporting humanitarian activities, especially for Anticipatory Action and Crisis Support.

Through the Weather4UN pilot project, Switzerland supported the establishment of the WMO Coordination Mechanism (WCM). The purpose of this mechanism is to curate authoritative weather, water and climate information from the WMO Community, delivering timely, accurate and actionable advice to the UN and other humanitarian agencies. Combined with humanitarian data, authoritative information, and expert advice from the WMO community, it provides situational awareness to the humanitarian community, enhancing preparedness and early response efforts.

The Weather4UN pilot project successfully supported the implementation of the WCM through various activities, especially with the development and prototyping of WCM products following a co-design approach with the humanitarian community and setting up automatic systems, training experts, and documentation. After the project's pilot phase, Switzerland will continue to support WCM by preparing WCM products, WCM processes and coordination in close collaboration with the WMO Secretariat and other WMO Members and Centres.

In addition, in collaboration with IFRC (International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies) and ETH Zurich, the Weather4UN pilot project developed a scalable and adaptable system to provide impact estimates of forecasted natural hazards. The system considers the hazard component, exposure, and vulnerability. Thus, it provides impact estimates as a metric to trigger anticipatory action and funding, enabling humanitarian actors to plan and estimate the best responses to protect the most vulnerable populations.

Near the end of the Weather4UN pilot project, several learnings can be drawn from those activities, for example, (1) the importance of collaboration, dialogue and co-design between provider and user to increase the usefulness of the product, (2) simplicity is needed to communicate efficiently, and (3) the need for open sharing of information to allow consistent messaging.

The session covers examples of remote sensing applications in disaster and risk management. A special focus is laid on rapid mapping in the aftermath of a natural hazard event to get a situational overview for interventions.

The ICA Commission on Cognitive Issues in Geographic Information Visualization plans a workshop to bridge the communities of risk researchers and visualisers. The workshop will cover uncertainty, emotions and real-time information handling in visualising and communicating natural hazards. The workshop's first part will possibly have a keynote presentation followed by 3-4 short talks. We deliberately want small contributions to allow enough time to discuss the inputs. The second part of the workshop will be more practical. Participants can showcase developments, platforms, visualisations and tools. There could be demos of applications, and participants could try them out live. The idea is to have room for an interactive exchange of ideas and allow for feedback. Moreover, engaging with applications also allows for eliciting current challenges in risk/hazard communication and collaboratively sketching ideas for solutions and improvements. We want to bring together a diverse audience that can learn from each other.

With the increasing frequency and intensity of climate-related hazards, societies are continuously exposed to disasters. Early warning systems (EWS) play a major role in protecting livelihoods and infrastructure. They are mostly based on predicting physical variables such as precipitation, wind speed, temperature or streamflow. Now, two novelties challenge conventional approaches. First, machine learning (ML) pushes the boundaries by outpacing and outperforming previous approaches. Second, shifting to impact-based forecasting, i.e. predicting outcomes instead of drivers, is central to enabling targeted and effective mitigation.

This session delves into assessing AI's role in the future of EWS, e.g., by transforming how we predict, prepare for, and respond to climate-related hazards. It will emphasize the impact-based perspective, touching upon the next frontier: impact-centric ML. 

This session establishes a dialogue between humanitarian practitioners and early warning researchers. For this purpose, we welcome lightning talks covering machine learning research and operational systems for forecasting and vulnerability mapping of climate and natural hazards, such as floods, droughts, wildfires, tsunamis, landslides, hurricanes, and related topics. The talks are followed by an interactive session to start the discussion and build the community. 

In the conference session, we will invite (or include papers submitted to the conference already) topics that focus on current technologies from a scientific perspective, demonstrating innovation and discoveries, and applied projects demonstrating case studies. In scientific and applied contributions, we expect a reflection that outlines the relevance, strengths and limitations of the visualization or XR solution that is tested, used or proposed.

In the panel + forum session, we will facilitate two levels of dialogue:

1. Among experts to frame and provide an overview of the current understanding and future directions of the covered topics
2. Among audience and experts based on the current bottlenecks, pain points, challenges and exciting developments that might offer solutions.

Alpine and Arctic regions are affected by number of similar natural hazards (e.g. avalanches, landslides, etc.), expected to occur with increased severity and frequency due to thawing permafrost and extreme weather events. Consequently, much can be gained from the strengthening of collaboration and knowledge exchange at all levels of integrated disaster risk management, including effective monitoring, modeling, and the implementation of risk mitigation. During short presentations and an expert panel discussion, scientists and practitioners working in Switzerland and Arctic regions will present and reflect on best practices in integrated disaster risk management in these regions and the transfer of knowledge and implementation within different national technical guidelines strategic frameworks.

With the increasing frequency and intensity of climate-related hazards, societies are continuously exposed to disasters. Early warning systems (EWS) play a major role in protecting livelihoods and infrastructure. They are mostly based on predicting physical variables such as precipitation, wind speed, temperature or streamflow. Now, two novelties challenge conventional approaches. First, machine learning (ML) pushes the boundaries by outpacing and outperforming previous approaches. Second, shifting to impact-based forecasting, i.e. predicting outcomes instead of drivers, is central to enabling targeted and effective mitigation.

This session delves into assessing AI's role in the future of EWS, e.g., by transforming how we predict, prepare for, and respond to climate-related hazards. It will emphasize the impact-based perspective, touching upon the next frontier: impact-centric ML. 

This session establishes a dialogue between humanitarian practitioners and early warning researchers. For this purpose, we welcome lightning talks covering machine learning research and operational systems for forecasting and vulnerability mapping of climate and natural hazards, such as floods, droughts, wildfires, tsunamis, landslides, hurricanes, and related topics. The talks are followed by an interactive session to start the discussion and build the community. 

HEIs must frequently adapt broad, varied emergency management policies to deal with the scope of emergencies and disasters that can occur in on-campus settings. Fires, earthquakes, floods, and some of the most common natural disasters possess the capacity for losses of life and property, with the potential to effectively disrupt and damage a university community. Artificial crises, such as cybersecurity threats, CBRN hazards, protestors and campus shootings, among others, also pose a severe danger to life and property; to preemptively reduce or prevent the severity of emergencies, universities must coordinate and implement policies to effectively eliminate unnecessary risks'  and decrease potential losses.

Incidents vary among Acontinents, and it is worth examining the threats perceived by European, American, Japanese and other Universities and considering the steps these institutions may take to protect their communities from harm. 

HEIS need to have a well-designed plan of procedures to respond to emergencies. These response plans provide the entire campus with specific guidelines to properly prepare, respond, and recover from emergencies. The University as an organization, including facility members, students, staff, and suppliers, should all be familiar with the plan's procedures and use it as a quick reference for effective action.  

This session covers presentations on the topic of weather forecasts for health management, with a focus on heat, drought, and epidemiology.

Open to the public

First part Keynote Leonardo Milano on 'Using science to enable anticipatory humanitarian action'.Afterwards farewell talks from the Chairs.