A Review of Spatial Variations of Multiple Natural Hazards and Risk Management Strategies in Pakistan

Abstract

Natural hazards are dynamic and unpredictable events that are a continuous threat to global socio-economic development. Humans’ reactions to these catastrophes are influenced by their proximity to the hazards and their ability to anticipate, resist, cope with, and recover from their consequences. Due to climatic changes, the risk of multiple natural hazards is expected to increase in several regions of Pakistan. There is a pressing need to understand the spatial discrepancies of natural hazards due to climate change and identifying the regions that require special measures to increase resilience, achieve adaptation, and sustainable development goals. This paper synthesizes the related literature to understand spatial variations of natural hazards due to climate changes across Pakistan. The Emergency Events Database (EM-DAT), National Aeronautics and Space Administration Global Landslide Catalog (NASA-GLC), National Disaster Management Authority (NDMA), and Pakistan Meteorological Department (PMD) are utilized to analyze spatial discrepancies and vulnerabilities to natural hazards. This study unveils that Pakistan’s current risk analysis and management strategies seem to be obsolete compared to global trends. Because of spatial variations of hazards, most research work on hazard risk assessments and risk management focuses on a single hazard, neglecting the co-occurrence impact of different natural hazards. Very limited studies are included in comprehensive multi-hazard risk strategies. Therefore, in Pakistan, risk management would require integrated multi-hazard risk assessment approaches to detect, analyze, measure, and evaluate various natural hazards, their effects, and interconnections. Moreover, the Pakistan governmental institutes dealing with natural hazards should focus on pre-disaster mitigation and resilience techniques instead of investing only in post-disaster relief activities.

Evaluation of natural radioactivity and radiological hazards in water sample of Tounsa Sharif, South Punjab, Pakistan

“…Tehsil Taunsa is located at the latitude of 30.705557 and the longitude of 70.657776, with the gps coordinates of 30°42' 20.0052' N and 70°39' 27.9936' E. It is a Tehsil of district Dera Ghazi Khan of Pakistan, situated at the Indus River, extend to Suleiman Mountain range and about 395 km in the southwest of Islamabad [17]. The area of Tehsil Taunsa is 300 km 2 and has a population of 0.75 million (figure 2).…”

Impact of climatic anomalies and reservoir induced seismicity on earthquake generation using Federated Learning

“…Occurrence of an earthquake are one of the most difficult natural phenomena that is very hard to predict. Many researchers have been working for earthquake prediction but no fruitful result have been obtained yet [15]. In the current research, impact of climatic anomalies and artificial stresses or regional seismicity has been studied as presented below:…”

Impact of climatic anomalies and reservoir induced seismicity on earthquake generation using Federated Learning

“…Pakistan has suffered many destructive earthquakes due to its location in one of the seismically most active regions of the world. Its high seismic activity is due to its geographical location in the IndusSanpo-sutur zone, where the Eurasian and Asian plates interact (Hussain et al, 2023). The geology and seismology of Pakistan are also affected by many first-order plate tectonic processes, including subduction zones, ongoing large-scale transform faulting, crustal compression, and extension (Manzoor et al, 2023).…”

“…Similarly, other researchers anticipated significant anomalies in rainfall and extremes in temperature may be significant in an earthquake generation (Mansouri et al, 2023). Varying patterns of rainfall and temperature may be considered as environmental driving forces that affects the generation of major seismic events (Hussain et al, 2023).…”