Floods are the most common natural disasters on earth. Population growth with global warming and climate changes increases the impact of floods on people every year. Combating natural disasters such as floods is possible with effective disaster management. An effective disaster management can only be possible with a comprehensive risk analysis. Flood risks depend on many factors such as precipitation, flow, earth slope, soil structure, and population density. A holistic flood risk analysis considering all these factors will provide a more effective disaster management. This study focuses on an assessment of flood hazard analysis in Bitlis province of Turkey using analytical hierarchy method which is a multi-parameter modeling technique. Flood hazard zones were mapped according to the weight of the selected factor by using geographic information system. It is concluded that while especially the south-western regions are exposed to high flood risk due to high stream density and precipitation, the high slope and rugged nature of this region restrict the risk mainly to the vicinity of low elevation streams and high population regions.

This study presents the landslide susceptibility assessment of the region by considering the landslide-susceptible hazard factors such as slope, precipitation, soil, lithology, distance to the river, land use, elevation, aspect, and distance to active faults as well as historical landslide events and population throughout the province of Bitlis. For this purpose, a GIS-based Analytical Hierarchy Process (AHP) was used as an effective method in multiple decision-making methods. The results showed that approximately 25% of the study area has moderate to high landslide susceptibility. Accordingly, the landslide susceptibility of the study area is high, especially in the southwest and southeast parts of the study area which have mountainous and deep river valleys, and the partially mountainous regions in the north. Compared with previous landslide records and similar susceptibility maps in the literature, the results were found to be quite successful in determining landslide susceptibility of the study area. However, risk assessment wasn’t made within the scope of the study.

Rockfall is one of the important natural disasters that can result in death, although it does not occur very often. Bitlis province in Turkey is frequently exposed to serious rockfall events due to its rugged-mountainous structure and harsh climatic conditions. Rockfall risk rely on many hazard factors such as slope, lithology, soil, elevation, precipitation, vulnerability factors i.e., land use and population. The Analytical Hierarchy process (AHP) is a highly skilled approach for risk assessment studies involving multiple decision-making criteria. In this study, the rockfall risk assessment of the province of Bitlis, which was chosen as the study area, was performed using AHP, and discussed. Geographic Information System (GIS) were used to visualize the results maps. The study concluded that the rockfall risks were mostly concentrated in the mountainous and rugged southwest and partially southeast areas, including the city and district centers. Except for the foothills of the volcanic mountains, the northern parts of the study area were generally considered as risk-free. The risk zones obtained from the study are relatively consistent with the results of a previous limited study.

Bitlis province, located in the Eastern Anatolia of Turkey, is the region with the highest snowfall in the country. Due to its highland and steep structure, the region is under high avalanche risk. Assessment of the snow avalanche risks is important in terms of modern disaster management. In this study, the avalanche risks were assessed by using the analytical hierarchy process (AHP), which is an effective multiple criteria decision-making methods. The avalanche risk was considered depend on many factors such as temperature, slope, elevation, aspect, land use, soil, lithology, precipitation, distance to fault and population. The outputs obtained from the method were mapped in the GIS environment and thus the avalanche risks of the region were determined. According to the results, especially the highland and steep southern parts and the two volcanic mountain foothills in the region were evaluated as high risk. The study results were validated by comparing past avalanche events and some previous researches.