Action on Natural Disasters (AND) funded alumni

Samprada Pradhan, PhD student

During the monsoon season, very heavy rainfall can cause severe landslides in the mountains of the Himalaya in Nepal. The April 2015 earthquake in Nepal will have made the hill slopes weaker and more landslides are likely to follow in the monsoons over the next 5 to 10 years. Landsliding causes many problems for the roads of Nepal which become blocked by debris. This project, funded by AND, involved soil testing and computer modelling of landslides to investigate the effects on the roads due to landsliding caused by earthquakes or monsoon rainfall. 

Gopi Basyal, PhD student

Landslides in the Himalaya generate a significant hazard to mountain communities. Whilst much is known about the risks that landslides and their secondary impacts pose, such as landslides dams, communicating this science in a timely and effective manner to those at risk remains challenging. This project, funded by AND, explored current practices used at community level to communicate landslide risk, and identify ways to enhance risk communication by drawing on new and innovative interdisciplinary research on landslide risk, psychology and community-based disaster risk reduction. The outputs will be an exploration of forward planning risk communication strategies, with the aim of reducing the impacts of landslides in Nepal as and when they occur. 

Katy Burrows, PhD student

Katy is one of 2016 intake of the multidisciplinary AND doctoral training programme and is based in Earth Sciences. Katy's research will focus on the use of satellite radar in identifying earthquake-triggered landslides, using the 2015 Gorkha earthquake as a case study. The aim of the project is to develop an automatic detection algorithm for earthquake-triggered landslides and to use this to produce an inventory of landsliding in Nepal from 2014-2018.