Post-disaster recovery has been addressed in the literature by different sectoral perspectives and scientific communities. Nevertheless, studies providing holistic approaches to recovery, integrating reconstruction procedures and socio-economic impacts, are still lacking. Additionally, there is a gap in disaster recovery research addressing the additional challenges posed by the effect of complex, multiple, and interacting risks on highly interconnected urban areas. Furthermore, recovery has only been marginally explored from a pre-disaster perspective in terms of planning and actions to increase urban resilience and recoverability. This paper provides a critical review of existing literature and guidelines on multi-risk disaster recovery with the twofold aim of identifying current gaps and providing the layout to address multi-risk recovery planning tools for decision-making. The literature on disaster recovery is investigated in the paper by focusing on the definition of the recovery phase and its separation or overlapping with other disaster risk management phases, the different destinations and goals that an urban system follows through recovery pathways, the requirements to implement a holistic resilience-based recovery roadmap, the challenges for shifting from single-risk to multi-risk recovery approaches, and the available tools for optimal decision-making in the recovery planning. Finally, the current challenges in multi-risk recovery planning are summarized and discussed. This review can be a ground basis for new research directions in the field of multi-risk recovery planning to help stakeholders in decision-making and optimize their pre-disaster investments to improve the urban system's recoverability.

When multiple weather‐driven hazards such as heatwaves, droughts, storms or floods occur simultaneously or consecutively, their impacts on society and the environment can compound. Despite recent advances in compound event research, risk assessments by practitioners and policymakers remain predominantly single‐hazard focused. This is largely due to traditional siloed approaches that assess and manage natural hazards. Hence, there is a need to adopt a more ‘multi‐hazard approach’ to managing compound events in practice. This paper summarizes discussions from a 2‐day workshop, held in Glasgow in January 2023, which brought together scientists, practitioners and policymakers to: (1) exchange a shared understanding of the concepts of compound and multi‐hazard events; (2) learn from examples of science–policy–practice integration from both the single hazard and multi‐hazard domains; and (3) explore how success stories could be used to improve the management of compound events and multi‐hazard risks. Key themes discussed during the workshop included developing a common language, promoting knowledge co‐production, fostering science–policy–practice integration, addressing complexity, utilising case studies for improved communication and centralising information for informed research, tools and frameworks. By bringing together experts from science, policy and practice, this workshop has highlighted ways to quantify compound and multi‐hazard risks and synergistically incorporate them into policy and practice to enhance risk management.

During the autumn of 2011 two catastrophic, very intense rainfall events affected two different parts of the Liguria Region of Italy causing various flash floods. The first occurred in October and the second at the beginning of November. Both the events were characterized by very high rainfall intensities (> 100 mm h⁻¹) that persisted on a small portion of territory causing local huge rainfall accumulations (> 400 mm 6 h⁻¹). Two main considerations were made in order to set up this work. The first consideration is that various studies demonstrated that the two events had a similar genesis and similar triggering elements. The second very evident and coarse concern is that two main elements are needed to have a flash flood: a very intense and localized rainfall event and a catchment (or a group of catchments) to be affected. Starting from these assumptions we did the exercise of mixing the two flash flood ingredients by putting the rainfall field of the first event on the main catchment struck by the second event, which has its mouth in the biggest city of the Liguria Region: Genoa. A complete framework was set up to quantitatively carry out a “what if” experiment with the aim of evaluating the possible damages associated with this event. A probabilistic rainfall downscaling model was used to generate possible rainfall scenarios maintaining the main characteristics of the observed rainfall fields while a hydrological model transformed these rainfall scenarios in streamflow scenarios. A subset of streamflow scenarios is then used as input to a 2-D hydraulic model to estimate the hazard maps, and finally a proper methodology is applied for damage estimation. This leads to the estimation of the potential economic losses and of the risk level for the people that stay in the affected area. The results are interesting, surprising and in a way worrying: a rare but not impossible event (it occurred about 50 km away from Genoa) would have caused huge damages estimated between 120 and EUR 230 million for the affected part of the city of Genoa, Italy, and more than 17 000 potentially affected people.

Drought impacts are increasingly recognized as interdisciplinary, socially influenced processes often resulting in uneven outcomes across different social groups, rather than as mere hydro-climatic events. Yet, many drought impact studies do not fully integrate the knowledge and perspectives of those who directly experience the impacts of droughts. While knowledge co-creation represents a promising avenue to address this challenge, there still remains an ample margin of improvement in the depth and breadth of transdisciplinary approaches in drought impact studies: most studies either limit co-creation to specific phases of the research process (breadth) or fail to meaningfully incorporate non-academic knowledge within those phases (depth). Drawing from a diverse body of literature on transdisciplinarity in sustainability science, integrated water resources management, socio-hydrology, science and technology studies, and critical water studies, we delineate five key dimensions which can support broader and deeper knowledge co-creation processes in drought impact studies, including (1) setting up a collaborative space, (2) framing the co-modelling process, (3) shaping a shared knowledge of drought, (4) co-selecting and co-developing models to understand drought impacts, and (5) being aware of power biases and knowledge imbalances. Incorporating all five dimensions promotes broader and more comprehensive studies, while exploring each dimension in greater detail enhances their depth. Together, these dimensions provide conceptual guidance for developing transdisciplinary approaches that are more integrated, power-sensitive, inclusive, situated, and reflexive.