José Luís Zêzere

University of Lisbon | UL · Institute of Geography and Territorial Planning

O estudo dos padrões da mortalidade associada a movimentos de vertente na ilha de São Miguel para o período entre 1900 e 2020 foi suportado na base de dados NATHA. Foram catalogados 236 eventos que causaram 82 vítimas mortais, resultando numa taxa de mortalidade por evento de 0,35 e uma média de 0,7 mortes/ano. Os períodos 1930- 1949 e 1990-1999 ap...

Mosquitoes are regarded as the most dangerous creatures on earth, spreading deadly pathogens through their bites. Human activities are driving range expansions of many mosquito species by unintentionally introducing them beyond their native ranges. Despite the often dire consequences for human health, a global picture of the introduction trends and...

This study assesses the physical vulnerability of buildings in the Lisbon Metropolitan Area (LMA) to landslides triggered by rainfall and earthquakes. The susceptibility to rainfall-induced landslides was evaluated using the Information Value statistical model and validated through ROC curve analysis. Additionally, the susceptibility to earthquake-...

Climate change has brought about new risks while exacerbating existing ones, with floods now accounting for about 45% of global disasters. This trend indicates that the exposure to floods and resulting damages will continue to rise. This paper aims to contribute to the global efforts to enhance flood resilience in urban areas by introducing a physi...

Rainfall-triggered landslides pose a significant threat to both infrastructure and human lives, making it crucial to comprehend the factors that contribute to their occurrence. Specifically , understanding the relationship between these factors and the amount of rain that is necessary for triggering such events is essential for effective prediction...

The present work aims to evaluate potential sources of uncertainty associated with rainfall-triggered event-based landslide inventories within the framework of landslide susceptibility assessment. Therefore, this study addresses the following questions: (i) How representative is an event-based landslide inventory map of the total landslide activity...

Several regions in Europe are exposed to multiple climate hazards, although their integrated understanding is still limited. The Riskcoast WebGIS platform, developed in the context of the project with the same name, aims to identify the exposed elements and carry out a current and future multirisk mapping assessment in climate change scenarios, for...

Exposure and vulnerability analysis are valuable tools for wildfire management, especially important for local communities that suffer from very destructive events and that require mitigation approaches adjusted to their abilities and needs. We present a methodological procedure to analyze wildfire exposure levels, social vulnerability conditions a...

Landslides are the most frequent type of natural hazard in the Azores archipelago, primarily due to the volcanic nature and geomorphologic features of the islands. The NATHA (Natural Hazards in Azores) database is a repository of documents reporting those natural disaster events that have occurred on the Azores since their settlement in the mid-fif...

In Portugal, scholarly attention towards geohazards has grown significantly since the 1980s, with various analytical methods employed to study these phenomena, including physically-based models, data-driven models, and heuristic techniques. The published research has contributed to a better understanding of the underlying processes, but also includ...

Gran número de trabajos sobre umbrales de lluvia para el desencadenamiento de inestabilidades de ladera se ha desarrollado en áreas del norte de Portugal y España. Como resultado de una revisión, se han recopilado 103 umbrales. Más del 30% aún no han sido publicados. La comparación de cuatro umbrales regionales pone de manifiesto importantes difere...

Movimentos gravitacionais de massa são fenômenos naturais que impactam a economia, a infraestrutura e a vida de milhares de pessoas. Na modelagem estatística, os Modelos Digitais do Terreno (MDTs) são frequentemente utilizados na identificação das cicatrizes de escorregamentos e na geração dos mapas temáticos causativos que podem ser analisados ind...

Neste capítulo, descrevem-se os conceitos associados à análise de risco, que inclui diversas componentes interligadas e representativas de aspetos específicos dos processos perigosos e/ou dos seus impactos. Depois apresentam-se alguns dos perigos que afetam as áreas urbanas, em particular os que são induzidos por fenómenos naturais, cuja ocorrência...

Since the settlement of the São Miguel Island (Azores-Portugal), in the middle of the fifteenth century, there is a record of occurrence of landslides, some with high socioeconomic impact. In this work, we carried out a spatial, temporal and impact analysis of landslide events that were registered in the NATHA (Natural Hazards in Azores) database f...

This study assesses the physical vulnerability of buildings (PVB) in the Lisbon Metropolitan Area (LMA) exposed to landslides triggered by both rainfall and earthquakes. Firstly, a statistical model (Information Value), validated with a ROC curve, was adopted to assess susceptibility to landslides caused by rainfall. Secondly, an Analytic Hierarchy...

The Lisbon Metropolitan Area is a risk hotspot in Portugal due to excessive exposure to natural and environmental hazards. In this work, a multi-hazard susceptibility assessment is performed for the 118 parishes that constitute the study area, considering the spatial incidence of seven hazardous processes: earthquakes, tsunami, beach erosion and co...

Landslide inventories are essential for developing an accurate susceptibility assessment. However, the complete and systematic updating of these inventories is a time-consuming and challenging task. Therefore, we aimed to verify if the temporal updating of historical inventories improves the susceptibility models and if the size of the study area p...

For landslide susceptibility assessment, lithology information is often extrapolated from official geological maps, which do not allow a direct spatial transformation into a detailed lithological map. To overcome this limitation, a study was made for the Grande da Pipa River basin, Portugal, to detail the existing geological maps, keeping the units...

Floods are complex processes that combine local and global factors, causing recurrent and significant human and material losses worldwide. The presented research consists of a multi-scale flood risk assessment process based on data sources collected at distinct scales, expressing hazard, exposure and physical vulnerability of buildings. Detailed Ce...

This paper presents a procedure for the application of an index-based vulnerability assessment method to the seismic risk assessment of 292,978 reinforced concrete and 152,916 unreinforced masonry buildings in the Lisbon Metropolitan Area (LMA). A singular innovation of this proposed methodology is that it is tailored to be fed with data from the 2...

We characterize fire regimes in central Portugal and investigate the degree to which the differences between regimes are influenced by a set of biophysical drivers. Using civil parishes as units of analysis, we employ three complementary parameters to describe the fire regime over a reference period of 44 years (1975–2018), namely cumulative percen...

Landscape patterns and composition were identified as key drivers of fire risk and fire regimes. However, few studies have focused on effective policymaking aimed at encouraging landowners to diversify the landscape and make it more fire-resilient. We propose a new framework to support the design of wildfire mitigation policies aimed at promoting l...

Citation: Mateos, R.M.; Sarro, R.; Díez-Herrero, A.; Reyes-Carmona, C.; López-Vinielles, J.; Ezquerro, P.; Martínez-Corbella, M.; Bru, G.; Luque, J.A.; Barra, A.; et al. Assessment of the SocioEconomic

Fire regimes in Mediterranean countries have been shifting in recent decades, including changes in wildfire size and frequency. We sought to describe changes in fire regimes across two periods (1975-1995 and 1996-2018) in a fire-prone region of central Portugal, explore the relationships between these regimes and territorial features, and check whe...

Extreme wildfires are increasingly rising to intense and uncontrolled fires, with dimension and destructive potentials that are greater than what has been seen and dealt with. The hazards posed by these fires increase significantly when they approach the wild–urban interface, with relevant environmental and socio-economic consequences. The 2009 Vic...

Social vulnerability, as one of the risk components, partially explains the magnitude of the impacts observed after a disaster. In this study, a spatiotemporally comparable assessment of social vulnerability and its drivers was conducted in Portugal, at the civil parish level, for three census frames. The first challenging step consisted of the sel...

A presente obra resulta das contribuições de quase 1000 investigadores internacionais sobre questões relacionadas com os incêndios florestais. A obra tem a sua origem na “9th International Conference on Forest Fire Research”, uma conferência internacional sobre a mesma temática, que reúne de 4 em 4 anos na região de Coimbra os mais prestigiados e r...

Wildfire risk assessment provides important tools to fire management, by analysing and aggregating information regarding multiple, interactive dimensions. The three main risk dimensions hazard, exposure and vulnerability, the latter considered in its social dimension, were quantified separately at the local scale for 972 civil parishes in central m...

RESUMO Os cenários futuros de subida do nível do mar em Portugal colocam, previsivelmente, em risco áreas sensíveis do ponto de vista natural e urbano. Partindo da definição da linha de máxima preia-mar de águas-vivas equinociais, a suscetibilidade à inundação costeira é avaliada recorrendo às alturas de sobre-elevação meteorológica, ao espraio de...

Estuarine margins are usually heavily occupied areas that are commonly affected by compound flooding triggers originating from different sources (e.g., coastal, fluvial, and pluvial). Therefore, estuarine flood management remains a challenge due to the need to combine the distinct dimensions of flood triggers and damages. Past flood data are critic...

Fluvial flooding continues to be a process that has a major impact on society, the environment and the economy. Although its natural triggering factors, the spatial configuration of exposure and vulnerability is expected to play a relevant role in explaining the damage records. The starting point of this research is the use of existing flood suscep...

This study addresses the role of natural hazard insurance in two European countries with different insurance markets and socioeconomic conditions: Sweden and Portugal. The analyses were conducted at the national, regional (Southern Sweden and Lisbon Metropolitan Area – LMA), and local (Malmö and Lisbon cities) scales. Most damage caused by weather...

The Lisbon metropolitan area (LMA, central-west of Portugal) has been severely affected by different geohazards (flooding episodes, landslides, subsidence, and earthquakes) that have generated considerable damage to properties and infrastructures, in the order of millions of euros per year. This study is focused on the analysis of subsidence, as re...

Disaster communication guidelines emphasize that journalists should be aware of past major disasters and draw lessons from the coverage of those events. The press is an important source for the evolution of historical disaster and risk research paradigms over time. This study explored the top 10 damaging hydrogeomorphological events in Portugal sel...

The increase in the number of heavy precipitation events and drought periods due to climate change induce geohazards that significantly affect the economy and pose significant threats to the population. The coast is a particularly vulnerable territory, as it has been extensively modified by urban development mainly related to tourism. The RISKCOAST...

Wildfires in Portugal have been increasingly affecting urban areas, putting people and property at risk. With the fires of 2017, several measures were proposed to increase the protection of settlements and the population. Therefore, this study analyzes the implementation of the "safe villages and safe people" program, considering the spatial distri...

The spatial and temporal patterns of wildfires and their effects over a given area can be described using the concept of fire regime. Here, we characterize fire regimes Central Portugal and investigate the degree to which the differences between regimes are influenced by a set of biophysical drivers. Using civil parishes as units of analysis, we em...

Fluvial flooding continues to be a process that has a major impact on society, the environment and the economy. Although its triggering factors are natural, the spatial configuration of exposure and vulnerability is expected to play a relevant role in explaining the damage records. The starting point of this research is the use of existing flood su...

Understanding the impacts of multi-hazard risk in urban areas is a fundamental step towards the adoption of resilience-enhancement and disaster prevention strategies, underpinning institutional adjustments aimed at improving the capacity of the authorities and stakeholders to manage risk. Within this framework, the work presented in this paper seek...

This data paper describes the multinational Database of Flood Fatalities from the Euro-Mediterranean region FFEM-DB that hosts data of 2,875 flood fatalities from 12 territories (nine of which represent entire countries) in Europe and the broader Mediterranean region from 1980 to 2020. The FFEM-DB database provides data on fatalities’ profiles, loc...

Estuaries are usually affected by compound flooding triggers that cause diverse territorial damages. While fluvial flood risk assessment frameworks are well established in the literature, integrated management instruments that deal with estuarine flood risk remain incomplete and often lacking. This research presents a methodology to extract relevan...

Landslides are deposits of rock, debris, and earth that have moved down a slope by gravity. The five major types of landslides based on mechanisms are falls, topples, slides, spreads, and flows. This article describes shallow slides, which are one of the most common types of landslides in all the world's climate zones and are characterized by a red...

The development of integrated decision-support tools, able to assess multiple hazards at the regional and local scales, is a fundamental step to enhance the preparedness of urban areas to mitigate present and future risks arising from climate change. Understanding multi-hazard risk can help prioritize resilience-increasing actions and disaster prev...

O período entre 2018 e 2022 mostrou-nos que o problema dos incêndios à escala global não está a diminuir, antes pelo contrário. Parece que as consequências das alterações climáticas já estão a afectar a ocorrência de incêndios florestais em várias partes do Mundo, de uma forma que só esperaríamos que acontecesse vários anos mais tarde. Em muitos pa...

The spatial and temporal properties of burned areas are a major component of fire regimes. We analyse three parameters related to burned area within central Portugal, and then investigate the degree to which their variation is influenced by a set of biophysical drivers. Using civil parishes as units of analysis, we study three complementary paramet...

The concept of fire regime can be used to describe, with different degrees of complexity, the spatial and temporal patterns of fires and their effects within a given area and over a given period. In this work, we explore the relations between fire regime and a set of potential biophysical controls at a local scale, for 972 civil parishes in central...

O Quadro de Ação de Hyogo para a Redução do Risco de Desastre 2015-2030, veio salientar a necessidade da adoção de políticas, estratégias e medidas de redução de impactos baseadas no conhecimento integrado dos fatores de risco (UNISDR, 2015; UNDRR, 2019). Muito se tem progredido neste sentido, proporcionando aos decisores e técnicos um melhor conhe...

A freguesia de Alvares foi gravemente afetada em 2017, tendo ardido cerca de 70% da sua área, tornando-se necessário melhorar a sua capacidade de resposta. Para isso, foram aplicadas duas metodologias: com recurso a ferramentas SIG (cost path e cost distance) e com o Pedestrian Evacuation Analyst Tool (PEAT). Comparando ambas as abordagens, a popul...

Resumo Um índice de risco de incêndio foi aplicado às 972 freguesias da região Centro de Portugal Continental, integrando três dimensões: perigosidade, exposição e vulnerabilidade social. As freguesias do setor centro-sul apresentam níveis de risco mais elevados. Os padrões espaciais variam para cada dimensão; a vulnerabilidade mais elevada ocorre...

A freguesia de Alvares, no concelho de Góis, foi muito afetada pelos incêndios de junho de 2017, tendo ardido 70% da sua área. Para melhorar a proteção das comunidades locais e aumentar a sua capacidade de resposta, é fundamental avaliar o nível de exposição das povoações a grandes incêndios. Neste sentido, foi avaliado o nível de exposição das pov...

Wildfire susceptibility and hazard models based on drivers that change only on a multiyear timescale are considered of a structural nature. They ignore specific short-term conditions in any year and period within the year, especially summer, when most wildfire damage occurs in southern Europe. We investigate whether the predictive capacity of struc...

Modeling and understanding the impact of climate change on flooding processes in Mediterranean climate areas, namely in southern Europe, is a complex endeavor that must also consider losses and vulnerability patterns. Understanding disaster risk involves multidimensional and multiscale information, demanding the development of methods that integrat...

Wildfire susceptibility maps are a well-known tool for optimizing available means to plan for prevention, early detection, and wildfire suppression in Portugal, especially regarding the critical fire season (1 July − 30 September). These susceptibility maps typically disregard seasonal weather conditions on each given year, being based on predispos...

Dimensões da vulnerabilidade de populações expostas a inundação: apontamentos da literatura Redução do risco de desastres e a resiliência no meio rural e urbano Introdução Anualmente, como aponta o World Resources Institute (WRI, 2020), inundações afetam, em média, 21 milhões de pessoas em todo o planeta. Segundo projeções do mesmo instituto, em 20...

Resumo: Os estuários são áreas complexas onde coexistem múltiplos fatores forçadores do processo de inundação, como as marés, sobrelevação meteorológica ou o caudal fluvial. Simultaneamente são áreas intensamente ocupadas onde frequentemente estão localizadas infraestruturas críticas. A subida do nível médio do mar vem colocar novos desafios à gest...

We present new wildfire susceptibility and hazard maps for mainland Portugal. • Predisposing factors are landcover, slope angle and elevation. • We applied the Likelihood Ratio method and used fire history from 1975 to 2018. • Landcover favourability scores are obtained for different timeframes. • Structural maps can support spatial planning and ri...

In contemporary societies the media is oriented to cover disaster considering the intersection between three dimensions of risk: hazard, exposure and vulnerability. In the past, the prevailing theory was the naturalization of disasters that considered disasters as extreme events generated by the nature, where human action did not influence disaster...

The large wildfires of June 2017 disturbed many communities in central Portugal. The civil parish of Alvares was severely affected, with about 60% of its area burnt. Assessing the risk of large wildfires affecting local communities is becoming increasingly important, to reduce potential losses in the future. In this study, we assessed wildfire risk...

Despite the current developments in flood forecasting and emergency management, floods still consist a significant threat to people and properties. At a national level in Europe, data on flood fatalities are fragmentary and they are mainly focused on death toll, without providing further details regarding victims' characteristics or the circumstanc...

Landslides have a direct impact in the ecosystems dynamics being considered one of the main vegetation perturbation processes. Our objective is to determine the relation between vegetation cover evolution and time period after landslide disturbance, and therefore to assess the potential use of vegetation evolution within landslide areas as temporal...

Understanding the characteristics of wildfire-affected communities and the importance of particular factors of different dimensions, is paramount to improve prevention and mitigation strategies, tailored to people's needs and abilities. In this study, we explored different combinations of biophysical and social factors to characterize wildfire-affe...

Rilo, A.; Tavares, A.; Freire, P.; Zêzere, J.L., and Haigh, I., 2020. Enhancing estuarine flood risk management: comparative analysis of three estuarine systems. In: Malvárez, G. and Navas, F. (eds.), Global Coastal Issues of 2020. Journal of Coastal Research, Special Issue No. 95, pp. 935-939 Coconut Creek (Florida), ISSN 0749-0208. Estuarine floo...