A multi-hazard historical catalogue for the city-island-state of Malta (Central Mediterranean)

Abstract

The city-island-state of Malta is traditionally viewed as a low-hazard country with the lack of a long historical catalogue of extreme events and their impacts acting as an obstacle to formulating evidence-based policies of disaster risk reduction. In this paper, we present the first multi-hazard historical catalogue for Malta which extends from the Miocene to 2019 CE. Drawing on over 3500 documents and points of reference, including historical documentary data, official records and social media posts, we identify at least 1550 hazard events which collectively have caused the loss of at least 662 lives. Recognising that historical materials relating to Malta are complicated by the presence of a strong temporal bias, we establish a four-point reliability indicator and apply this to each of the 1065 recordings, with the result that some 79% show a high degree of reliability. For an island state where there are significant gaps in the knowledge and understanding of the environmental extremes and their impacts over time, this paper addresses and fills these gaps in order to inform the development of public-facing and evidence-based policies of disaster risk reduction in Malta.

Reclassifying historical disasters: from single to multi-hazards

“…While existing studies have primarily aimed to enhance the understanding of multi-hazard interactions and to identify methods for assessing their impacts (Gill and Malamud, 2014;Tilloy et al, 2019), some have focused on investigating the co-occurrence of specific hazards at local or regional scales (Bell and Glade, 2012;Bevacqua et al, 2021;Camus et al, 2021;Gao et al, 2023;Ghanbari et al, 2021). However, classifying different types of multi-hazard events remains a challenging endeavor due to several factors: (1) unclear definitions of these events (Zscheischler et al, 2020); (2) the complex physical interactions between hazards, particularly when one hazard triggers another (Gill and Malamud, 2014); (3) potential spatial and temporal overlap between hazards (Kappes et al, 2012); and (4) a lack of long historical record of multi-hazard events (Chen et al, 2016;Main et al, 2022). Notably, there is a dearth of studies focusing on the classification of past multi-hazard events and their global-scale impacts.…”

“…The lack of reliable databases poses a significant challenge in identifying global-scale multi-hazard occurrences (Chen et al, 2016;Mahecha et al, 2020;Main et al, 2022). Currently, three global/ regional multi-hazard databases exist: EM-DAT, Munich Re and DesInventar (Formetta and Feyen, 2019;Wirtz et al, 2014), alongside numerous national, regional, and local databases worldwide.…”