Seismic damage scenarios for Mayotte: a tool for disaster management

A new marine volcano is erupting offshore Mayotte since May 2018, generating numerous earthquakes. The population felt many of them and the stronger shaking of the ongoing sequence caused slight damage to buildings. Historical records also confirm that damaging earthquakes had occurred in the past in this region. Seismic damage scenarios are a key tool for supporting the decision-making process, the preparedness, and for designing appropriate emergency responses. This paper provides the outcomes of a work consisting in improving the seismic risk assessment as a part of disaster risk governance and exposes the scientific background of this workflow. It illustrates its use with two earthquakes. Related post-seismic surveys provide observations that are useful to check the validity of the reference dataset. The paper also discusses the main characteristics of the rapid loss assessment tool that has been developed to provide operational information for crisis management

Global burden of 369 diseases and injuries in 204 countries and territories, 1990–2019: a systematic analysis for the Global Burden of Disease Study 2019

Background: In an era of shifting global agendas and expanded emphasis on non-communicable diseases and injuries along with communicable diseases, sound evidence on trends by cause at the national level is essential. The Global Burden of Diseases, Injuries, and Risk Factors Study (GBD) provides a systematic scientific assessment of published, publicly available, and contributed data on incidence, prevalence, and mortality for a mutually exclusive and collectively exhaustive list of diseases and injuries. Methods: GBD estimates incidence, prevalence, mortality, years of life lost (YLLs), years lived with disability (YLDs), and disability-adjusted life-years (DALYs) due to 369 diseases and injuries, for two sexes, and for 204 countries and territories. Input data were extracted from censuses, household surveys, civil registration and vital statistics, disease registries, health service use, air pollution monitors, satellite imaging, disease notifications, and other sources. Cause-specific death rates and cause fractions were calculated using the Cause of Death Ensemble model and spatiotemporal Gaussian process regression. Cause-specific deaths were adjusted to match the total all-cause deaths calculated as part of the GBD population, fertility, and mortality estimates. Deaths were multiplied by standard life expectancy at each age to calculate YLLs. A Bayesian meta-regression modelling tool, DisMod-MR 2.1, was used to ensure consistency between incidence, prevalence, remission, excess mortality, and cause-specific mortality for most causes. Prevalence estimates were multiplied by disability weights for mutually exclusive sequelae of diseases and injuries to calculate YLDs. We considered results in the context of the Socio-demographic Index (SDI), a composite indicator of income per capita, years of schooling, and fertility rate in females younger than 25 years. Uncertainty intervals (UIs) were generated for every metric using the 25th and 975th ordered 1000 draw values of the posterior distribution. Findings: Global health has steadily improved over the past 30 years as measured by age-standardised DALY rates. After taking into account population growth and ageing, the absolute number of DALYs has remained stable. Since 2010, the pace of decline in global age-standardised DALY rates has accelerated in age groups younger than 50 years compared with the 1990–2010 time period, with the greatest annualised rate of decline occurring in the 0–9-year age group. Six infectious diseases were among the top ten causes of DALYs in children younger than 10 years in 2019: lower respiratory infections (ranked second), diarrhoeal diseases (third), malaria (fifth), meningitis (sixth), whooping cough (ninth), and sexually transmitted infections (which, in this age group, is fully accounted for by congenital syphilis; ranked tenth). In adolescents aged 10–24 years, three injury causes were among the top causes of DALYs: road injuries (ranked first), self-harm (third), and interpersonal violence (fifth). Five of the causes that were in the top ten for ages 10–24 years were also in the top ten in the 25–49-year age group: road injuries (ranked first), HIV/AIDS (second), low back pain (fourth), headache disorders (fifth), and depressive disorders (sixth). In 2019, ischaemic heart disease and stroke were the top-ranked causes of DALYs in both the 50–74-year and 75-years-and-older age groups. Since 1990, there has been a marked shift towards a greater proportion of burden due to YLDs from non-communicable diseases and injuries. In 2019, there were 11 countries where non-communicable disease and injury YLDs constituted more than half of all disease burden. Decreases in age-standardised DALY rates have accelerated over the past decade in countries at the lower end of the SDI range, while improvements have started to stagnate or even reverse in countries with higher SDI. Interpretation: As disability becomes an increasingly large component of disease burden and a larger component of health expenditure, greater research and developm nt investment is needed to identify new, more effective intervention strategies. With a rapidly ageing global population, the demands on health services to deal with disabling outcomes, which increase with age, will require policy makers to anticipate these changes. The mix of universal and more geographically specific influences on health reinforces the need for regular reporting on population health in detail and by underlying cause to help decision makers to identify success stories of disease control to emulate, as well as opportunities to improve. Funding: Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. © 2020 The Author(s). Published by Elsevier Ltd. This is an Open Access article under the CC BY 4.0 licens

Longshore transport estimation and inter-annual variability at a high-energy dissipative beach: St. Trojan beach, SW Oléron Island, France

International audienc

SURICATE-Nat: Innovative citizen centered platform for Twitter based natural disaster monitoring

International audienceIt is often difficult to promptly perceive the extent of the consequences of a natural disaster when roads are cut, mobile phone is saturated, and the fragmentary information coming from the stricken area arrive at the drip. It is however on the basis of this diagnosis that must be organized the disaster management, relief, assistance to the victims, and the monitoring of the dynamic of the phenomenon. During natural disaster, social media, especially Twitter, sometimes remain one of the only source of in-situ information, as was the case just after the disastrous earthquake of Haiti in 2010. Some of the messages exchanged make it possible to get a clear idea of the consequences thanks to testimonies, photos or videos. It is with this in mind that we have developed a participatory platform for semi-automatic analysis of Twitter posts related to natural disasters. So-called “SURICATE-Nat”, this online Frenchspeaking platform (www.suricatenat.fr) aims to exploit informative messages posted on Twitter immediately during/after occurrence of natural disasters. This platform aims to structure and enrich the flow of raw data from Twitter into a human based instrumental stream that can then be analyzed as those coming from technological sensors (e.g. seismometers, GPS, piezometers, etc.). In addition, responding to willingness of Internet users to have an active “engagement” in the analysis of their own data, SURICATE-Nat offers participatory functionalities recognizing the value of “citizen expertise” and allowing each user to bring their own testimonies and take part in manual classification of tweets posted by others. This methodology aims to take advantage of the complementarity of artificial intelligence and participative approaches, in order to provide robust indicators for decision support

Low-End Probabilistic Sea-Level Projections

International audienceIn the area of sea-level rise, recent research has focused on assessing either likely or high end future sea levels, but less attention has been given to low-end sea-level projections, exploring best-case potential sea-level changes and providing the basis for estimating minimum adaptation needs. Here, we provide global and regional probabilistic sea-level projections using conservative projections of glaciers and ice-sheets melting and a selection of models from the Coupled Model Intercomparison Project phase 5 (CMIP5) delivering moderate thermal expansion. Our low-end sea-level projections are higher than previously estimated because they rely on modeling outcomes only, and do not add any expert judgement, aiming essentially at delivering more realistic upper tails. While there are good reasons to believe that our projections are excessively optimistic, they can be used as low-end sea-level projections in order to inform users with low aversion to uncertainty. Our low-end sea-level projection exceeds 0.5 m along most inhabited coasts by 2100 for business as usual greenhouse gas emissions (RCP8.5), which is relevant for adaptation practitioners as long as efficient climate change mitigation policies are not implemented. This means that without efficient climate mitigation, an acceleration of sea-level rise can hardly be avoided during the 21st century

Scalable Interactive Platform for Geographic Evaluation of Sea-Level Rise Impact Combining High-Performance Computing and WebGIS Client

International audienceAs climate is changing, more applied information on its impacts is required to inform adaptation planning. It is a fact that during the last decade, the amount of information relevant for climate change impact assessment has grown drastically. This can be particularly illustrated in coastal areas, where a most important recent development has been the delivery of precise and accurate topography obtained by LiDAR at regional to national scales. However, these developments have not led to easier assessment of coastal climate change impacts. This is due to both to the complexity of coastal models that also depend on local natural changes and anthropogenic actions and to the difficulty to actually use such large and complex datasets. In this paper, we describe a prototype of web service to quickly communicate spatial information on future flooding along the French coastal zones. We discuss several issues related to data architecture at large scale, on-the-fly (geo)-processing capabilities, management of asynchronous workflows and data diffusion strategies in the context of international standards such as INSPIRE (Infrastructure for Spatial Information in Europe). We believe that our flexible architecture, mainly reusing off-the-shelf components is able to improve both complex scenarios analysis for experts and dissemination of these future coastal changes to the general public

VIGIRISKS platform, a web-tool for single and multi-hazard risk assessment

International audienceEnabling storing, scenario design, documentation, access and execution of scientific computations for multirisks mapping is the aim of the VIGIRISKS web platform currently designed and developed by the BRGM (French Geological Survey). VIGIRISKS platform insures geohazards data management, reproducibility of risks calculations, allows information transparency and improving efficiency by easing collaborative work and sharing results and practices. The scientific scope is multirisk mapping, including cascading effects, in the domain of natural hazard (earthquake, landslide and submersion) from the phenomenon modelling to the impact evaluation on exposed elements such as buildings. VIGIRISKS web platform initially designed for BRGM experts aims to be in a long-term an open repository for national and international experts working on natural hazards management. Integration and deployment of new datasets and computational processes oriented towards risks mapping is as automatic as possible for the convenience of users