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In the context of an earthquake impact, school units are particularly vulnerable because of the specific age group of the population that studies there. This means that the earthquake mitigation strategies targeting schools should be carefully elaborated, starting from a proper assessment of their seismic vulnerability. Such assessments should be extensively conducted, especially in the case of urban settlements that are disadvantaged in terms of economic potential, social development and media image, like Vaslui City, Romania. This paper aims to evaluate the seismic vulnerability of school units in Vaslui City using a combination of Multi-Criteria Decision-Making (MCDM) methods and Geographic Information System (GIS) techniques. Unlike other assessments of this type, the proposed framework integrates both aspects related to the physical vulnerability of the school buildings, and social elements concerning the educational personnel, the age profile of the pupils, school hours and other factors. The methodology also includes a systemic vulnerability component that offers better insights about the access emergency services would have to the educational institutions in case of a powerful earthquake. The physical, social and systemic vulnerability factors/criteria are weighed via Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP), while the 25 school units in the study area are evaluated using Weighted Product Model (WPM). The results are combined with GIS techniques in order to obtain a map that shows the seismic vulnerability level of the school units. The most vulnerable school units are the ones with tall old buildings located along narrow streets, with significant number of very young or disabled pupils. These findings represent the stepping stones for the retrofitting works and the educational programmes related to seismic hazards that should be implemented by local authorities. Although restricted by the low number of educational institutions in the study area, the proposed framework may be further on used in seismic vulnerability research.

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Since 1990, the deficiencies of the widely criticised health care system of Romania have been analysed from economic, political and management related points of view, but the territorial dimension of this system was often neglected. Identifying and understanding the shaping role of the spatial dimension are the prerequisites of any effective and compelling implementation of change. This paper aims to analyse the hospital network in Moldavia's counties from the geographic proximity based influence point of view. The polarisation areas of territorial, emergency and specialised (pneumology and phthisiology, psychiatric) hospitals are generated as Thiessen proximal polygons. These geometric constructions help to determinate the locations that are the closest to a particular hospital, which proves to be useful in medical emergency situations, but also when distance becomes an important restrictive factor-as in the case of vulnerable population with limited financial resources, scarce mobility opportunities or constraints imposed by age. The hospital network may be considered the backbone of the medical system and its spatial distribution should be taken into account as an important shaping factor. This paper offers a regional approach of this matter, which can be used for planning bottom-up improvement strategies.

Hydrological vulnerability (HV) is a (changing) underlying condition in all drainage basins, depending on the dynamics of the potentially dangerous hydrological phenomena, the particularities of drainage networks, land use patterns, and processes that shape landforms in extensive periods. The socioeconomic attributes and the hydrotechnical infrastructure add up to the manifestation of this type of vulnerability. In this paper, we assess the HV levels of 81 drainage basins in the NE of Romania for three distinctive periods (1990–1999, 2000–2009, 2010–2018), using a multi-criteria approach. Two classical multi-criteria decision making (MCDM) methods were combined in order to evaluate the HV according to factors that refer to floods and hydrological drought occurrences, hydrotechnical structure coverage, the drainage network, land use, and landforms characteristics. The Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP) was applied to weigh these factors and the resulting relative importance values were integrated in the Technique for Order of Preference by Similarity to Ideal Solution (TOPSIS), by which the alternatives represented by the catchments were ranked. The attenuation of the HV through time follows an East–West direction, from the lower elevations of the Moldavian Plateau to the heights of the Carpathians. Hydrological droughts are more likely to occur in the Eastern part of the analyzed territory, while the western section displays a certain propensity for floods. The results may be used by local and national authorities in order to improve the hydrological risk mitigation strategies, and to develop more targeted water management projects, properly calibrated to the conditions of the Northeast Development Region in Romania.