The IRDR ICoE on Informatics and Disaster Resilience (IRDR ICoE-IDR), hosted by the School of Architecture, Building and Civil Engineering at Loughborough University, United Kingdom, is pleased to announce the 19th session of the UNESCO-IMRR & SIMR Distinguished Webinar Series.
This upcoming session will feature a highly anticipated presentation by internationally renowned scholar Prof. Amir AghaKouchak, focusing on the complex dynamics of "Compound and Cascading Hazards: Typology, Impacts, and Attribution".
Scheduled for 21 October 2026, from 21:00 to 22:00 (Beijing Time), the online event will address a critical gap in modern disaster risk reduction. As climate extremes become more frequent, the simultaneous occurrence of multiple hazards—even those that are not individually severe—can lead to catastrophic impacts on ecosystems and society.
Prof. AghaKouchak, a Chancellor’s Professor at the University of California, Irvine, and Director of the Center for Hydrometeorology and Remote Sensing (CHRS), will lead the discussion. He also serves as the Lead for Water, Climate, and Infrastructure Risk at the United Nations University Institute for Water, Environment and Health (UNU-INWEH).
The webinar will explore why traditional extreme event classifications and environmental risk assessment methods often fail to capture the reality of compound events—such as droughts coinciding with heatwaves, rainfall over burn scars, or the compounding of marine and terrestrial floods. These events arise from complex, multi-causal, and interdependent processes.
Key highlights of the presentation will include:
Quantifying Infrastructure Risk: Methods for assessing the impact of compound hazards on infrastructure, specifically quantifying the failure probability of power grid components under current and future climate scenarios.
The Cost of Oversight: Evidence showing that ignoring the interactions between interconnected hazard drivers significantly underestimates overall risk.
New Methodological Framework: Approaches for identifying, modeling, risk assessing, and attributing compound events to support better decision-making and develop new research paradigms.
Prof. AghaKouchak is a Fellow of the American Geophysical Union (AGU), the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS), and the ASCE Environmental & Water Resources Institute. His work bridges hydrology, climatology, and remote sensing, with over 300 peer-reviewed publications to his name.
This session is part of the ongoing collaboration between IRDR ICoE-IDR, which also serves as the UNESCO Chair in Informatics and Multi-hazard Risk Reduction (UNESCO-IMRR and SIMR) to bring cutting-edge disaster science to the global research community, hosted by IRDR ICoE-IDR.
Event Details:
Topic: "Compound and Cascading Hazards: Typology, Impacts, and Attribution"
Speaker: Prof. Amir AghaKouchak
Date: Wednesday, October 21, 2026
Time: 21:00 – 22:00 (Beijing Time)
Format: Online Live Stream
Registration: Interested participants are required to register in advance. Please click the link below to secure your spot. Upon successful registration, a confirmation email with the meeting access link will be sent automatically.
