Vulnerability is a key element in the risk conception (risk = hazard + vulnerability), representing the circumstances determined by 'physical, social, economic, and ecologic factors or processes, of a community, system or asset that make it susceptible to the damaging effects of a hazard' [11]. A crucial part of the policies for disaster risk reduction is the reduction of vulnerability, which is related to the susceptibility of human development: human life, economy, social organisation, and the physical aspects of the environment. Although public and economic vulnerability are perceived as the most important components of vulnerability, it is very important to take into account the significance of the biophysical basis for human life -the environmental and physical aspects of vulnerability and to deal with them in an integrated way. The publication aims at analysis of the integrated vulnerability as a tool for disaster risk reduction by reduction of the vulnerability itself. The publication presents the approaches for integrated vulnerability analysis. The vulnerability is integrally analysed by its factors (exposure, susceptibility and resilience) and dimensions (social, economic, environmental and physical). The integrated vulnerability of a territory is measured as a combination of the factors listed above. All of them can be represented by a set of indicators, whose selection should be reasonable and well-grounded. The set of indicators should allow measurement of the vulnerability factors for each of the vulnerability dimensions. An integrated vulnerability analysis is developed and presented for a case study from Republic of Bulgaria.

Dealing with the devastating effects from natural disasters requires implementation of innovative approaches and integrated policies for disaster risk management. The development on the territory of Southeast Europe, including Republic of Bulgaria, is an object of various natural hazards, such as earthquakes, floods, strong winds, wildfires, etc. A number of political instruments of the EU promote development and implementation of integrated approaches for mitigation of the effects from natural disasters on development. The implementation of the European integrated policies by all member-states induces a number of challenges to governments, especially concerning data availability, access and credibility. This publication presents the main problems and challenges related to multi-risk assessment of natural hazards, regarding creation of a data model. Database concepts for multi-risk assessment and mapping shall include sufficient and quality information related to the separate stages of risk assessment -risk identification, risk analysis, and risk evaluation. In general, the challenges related to spatial data for multi-risk assessment and mapping come from the constraint to process, combine and evaluate data with different sources, and formats, which is often different to compare and relate. At the national level, data models face further difficulties of limited access to information, high prices and lower requirements for data quality. The publication presents an approach for multi-hazard risk assessment in Bulgaria, a geodatabase conceptual model and the challenges ahead its creation and processing. The data and data sources are evaluated in terms of their quality, availability, input and reliability to the achieved results of multi-risk assessment and mapping in Bulgaria.

While platial representations are being developed for sedentary entities, a parallel and useful endeavor would be to consider time in so-called “platio-temporal” representations that would also expand notions of mobility in GIScience, that are solely dependent on Euclidean space and time. Besides enhancing such aspects of place and mobility via spatio-temporal, we also include human aspects of these representations via considerations of the sociological notions of mobility via the mobilities paradigm that can systematically introduce representation of both platial information along with mobilities associated with ‘moving places.’ We condense these aspects into ‘platial mobility,’ a novel conceptual framework, as an integration in GIScience and the mobilities paradigm in sociology, that denotes movement of places in our platio-temporal and sociology-based representations. As illustrative cases for further study using platial mobility as a framework, we explore its benefits and methodological aspects toward developing better understanding for disaster management, disaster risk reduction and pandemics. We then discuss some of the illustrative use cases to clarify the concept of platial mobility and its application prospects in the areas of disaster management, disaster risk reduction and pandemics. These use cases, which include flood events and the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic, have led to displaced and restricted communities having to change practices and places, which would be particularly amenable to the conceptual framework developed in our work.

No abstract