Resilience and Adaptation to Cascading Geohazards

Dear Colleagues,

Climate change is profoundly reshaping geohazard regimes in mountain regions worldwide. Rising temperatures, glacier retreat, permafrost degradation and increasingly frequent extreme precipitation are collectively destabilizing slopes, expanding sediment sources and altering hydrological systems at unprecedented rates. These changes are amplifying the occurrence of landslides, debris flows, glacial lake outburst floods, rock avalanches and flash floods, which increasingly interact through cascading chains rather than occurring as isolated events. Rainfall-triggered landslides can obstruct river channels, impounding dam lakes whose subsequent failure produces catastrophic outburst floods, while breaches of moraine-dammed glacial lakes are capable of entraining substantial volumes of sediment and transforming into far-reaching debris flows that propagate through the entire basin. Such compound hazard sequences pose escalating risks to mountain communities, transportation corridors and critical infrastructure, yet the formation conditions, triggering thresholds and cascade pathways governing these multi-hazard interactions remain insufficiently understood.

The goal of this Special Issue is to collect papers (original research articles and review papers) to provide insights into the coupled dynamics of cascading geohazards under climate change, advancing multi-hazard risk assessment, early warning and resilience-oriented disaster risk reduction in mountain regions. This Special Issue bridges geomorphology, engineering geology, hydrology and climate adaptation and supports the Sendai Framework for Disaster Risk Reduction and the UN Sustainable Development Goals.

This Special Issue will welcome manuscripts that link the following themes:

• Triggering mechanisms, cascading processes and hazard chain evolution of mountain geohazards including ice/rock avalanches, landslides, glacial lake outburst floods and associated debris flows
• Multi-hazard coupling modeling, compound event analysis and dynamic risk prediction under climate projections
• Field investigation, laboratory experimentation and physical modeling of geohazard initiation and propagation mechanics
• Remote sensing, multi-source data fusion and long-term geohazard monitoring in mountain environments
• Early warning systems, triggering threshold identification and real-time forecasting for cascading geohazards
• Emergency response, nature-based solutions and synergistic eco-geotechnical measures for hazard mitigation
• Adaptive risk governance, infrastructure resilience and community resilience in mountain regions

We look forward to receiving your original research articles and reviews.

Dr. Xiangyang Dou
Dr. Jiang Xiong
Dr. Yuandong Huang
Guest Editors

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