Projects
Reconsidering the Adaptive Capacity of Asion Settlements. Disaster Resilient Urbanism in Interaction with Humanitarion Responses. KU Leuven
Recent international policies stress the need to (A) build more sustainable and resilient in order to decrease urban disasters that follow natural hazards and to (B) transcend the humanitarian-development divide [1]. Acknowledging that urban emergencies are increasing, a holistic framework for urban disaster resilience to respond to and prepare for disaster is indispensible (Global Alliance for Urban Crises, 2016a). Urbanism as key discipline ...
FWO sabbatical 2022-2023 (Prof. T. Soens). University of Antwerp
Imagining the Post-Anthropocene in the BioFutures Living Lab: Responding to Power Outage from a Multispecies Perspective KU Leuven
Power outages have become a reality for many people living in natural disaster sensitive areas and politically disruptive climates. When our power-driven infrastructures collapses, and darkness descends upon the Earth, we need to be creative in finding new ways to illuminate the planet. Bio art can become a way of attuning to new, nature-based realities. Bio artists observe natural phenomena and explore what we can learn from nature to ...
Global climate change hotspots in terms of multi-risk assessment of hydro-climatic hazards KU Leuven
The natural hazards can have devastating consequences on the society in terms of human health and mortality and also on the ecosystem and the economy. In the last decade, five billion people have been affected by natural disasters resulting in approximately $1 trillion of economic losses around the world. The hydro-climatic natural hazards are becoming more dangerous as a result of climate change and as population and infrastructure continue ...
Attribution analysis of changes in global droughts to anthropogenic influences KU Leuven
Drought is one of the most destructive natural disasters due to its prolonged and extensive socioeconomic impacts. It affects a massive number of people each year and inflicts significant challenges to the society and the environment. Compared to other natural hazards, the identification and characterization of drought are more challenging because of its slow onset and slow recovery, lack of a unified definition and the difficult ...
Climate change on bank balance sheets. Ghent University
Banks and regulators increasingly recognize climate change as a source of considerable risk. Rising temperatures and increasing natural disasters threaten people’s homes, livelihoods, and lives. Combatting these risks by limiting society’s excessive emission of greenhouse gases constitutes a major risk in and of itself that jeopardizes many firms’ financial health. While the financial system plays a central role in this problem, research on ...
Unraveling the depositional processes of megaturbidites in lakes using X-ray computed tomography Ghent University
Large, destructive earthquakes pose a significant risk to our society. Lake sediments constitute ideal natural archives of past earthquakes by virtue of the sedimentary traces they have left behind. When earthquakes trigger large and/or many landslides in lakes, the distal turbidity currents associated with these landslides can result in exceptionally thick deposits: so-called megaturbidites. The landslides usually also trigger lake tsunamis ...
Coming After: Late Antique Ecopoetics. Ghent University
Over the course of the 4th to the 6th centuries, the ancient world was coming to its end in the midst of massive change: the establishment of Christianity, alterations in political structures, and, as K. Harper has argued in The Fate of Rome, climate change. Now known as “late” antiquity, this period by definition comes after something. The fifth-century Christian historian Orosius, writing after the sack of Rome, describes his own era as an ...
Public support for climate change mitigation and eco-social policies in Europe: the role of social justice considerations in legitimising and promoting the transition to low-carbon societies KU Leuven
In the face of accelerating global warming and attendant natural disasters, it seems that governments all over the world eventually have to take measures mitigating the most adverse consequences of climate change. However, such measures are likely to be opposed if they do not reflect public attitudes. To better understand attitudes towards climate change mitigation policies (CMP), and in particular what influences support of them, scholars ...