Engineering Geological Hazard Assessment

Mass movement in the area of a water reservoir in Uzbekistan Source: BGR

Population growth and dense population concentration, growing accumulation of assets in urban areas, the increase of infrastructural vulnerability, the overexploitation of natural resources and the effects of climate change are causing a steadily swelling susceptibility to natural threats at local, regional and global level. This includes both geological hazards like earthquakes, landslides, volcanic eruptions, land subsidence or sinkholes and hydro-meteorological hazards such as hurricanes, floods, droughts and heat waves.

According to that fact, the civil society, political decision makers and, not least, the scientific community are faced with the task to assess and to evaluate the potential risks as the combination of occurrence probability of any hazard and its negative consequences. This is irrespective whether a national or trans-national natural disaster or a local damaging event is considered.

This approach is crucial in order to implement tailored risk management strategies taking into account structural (e.g. earthquake-resistant construction) and/or non-structural mitigation and prevention measures (e.g. risk-sensitive spatial planning) as a part of general public service.

Within the scope of technical cooperation and according to its general knowledge-based advisory assignment, the BGR currently pursues following focal points in the fields of Disaster Risk Management/Engineering-Geological Hazard Assessment: 

• Identification, evaluation and prediction of engineering-geological hazard potentials
• Risk-sensitive spatial planning
• Knowledge management/knowledge transfer in the framework of Technical Cooperation

In the topic area of engineering-geological hazard assessment following project contributions are provided:

• Pakistan - Promoting Resilience against Natural Disaster Impacts (NADIR)
• Indonesia - ‘Good Local Governance – Mitigation of Georisks’
• Latin America - ‘Capacity Building Measure – Risk Sensitive Spatial Planning’
• ‘Information System Building Ground/Spatial Planning (ISBS)’
• Standard Modules ‘Geohazard Assessment/Risk-Sensitive Spatial Planning’
• Method Development and Application of ‘Terrestrial Laserscanning (TLS)

You can find information about and download link to the software product 'Landslide Susceptibility Assessment Tools - Project Manager Suite' (LSAT PM) here.