Susie Goodall *1, Tom Dijkstra 1, Ksenia Chmutina 1
1 School of Architecture, Building and Civil Engineering, Loughborough University, Loughborough, LE11 3TU, UK; s.goodall@lboro.ac.uk
Landslides and debris flows are natural hazards that can cause disasters including loss of life, disruption and damage to infrastructure. They are complex and affected by factors as diverse as rainfall events, policy decisions, economic development, land use changes and the everyday actions of people. Reducing disaster risk therefore needs approaches that combine insights from natural, social and engineering sciences, including knowledge about the hazard, who or what is exposed and when, how society is vulnerable, what capacity people have to respond and large-scale mitigation efforts by governments. Strategies to combine knowledge and cross disciplinary boundaries include understanding the questions different disciplines are asking, using conceptual frameworks that combine human and environmental influences and developing local, contextual case studies.
A case study is presented with an approach for interdisciplinary research in the Bailong River corridor (in Gansu Province, China). This is an area particularly affected by landslides and debris flows, and the Zhouqu debris flow disaster in 2010, which killed more than 1,700 people, brought to prominence the risks faced by people living in the valley.