Mapping crisis and alert areas from a high-resolution dynamic modelling of people's exposure to hazards – MACRISAL

This exploratory project aims to map crisis and alert areas at the French mainland scale, before hazards occur, to anticipate crisis effect and make crisis management and alert operations more spatially and temporally accurate. This mapping is akin to spatial crisis planning and has never before been explored in the scientific literature. To identify these crises and alert areas, this project is based on a dynamic, high-resolution mapping of people's exposure to various environmental hazards. Three objectives have been identified:
1) to propose a method for accurately locating (on the building scale), dynamically (over several daily/annual time steps) and holistically (over the whole of mainland France) populations exposed to natural and technological hazards;
2) to study the dynamic exposure of territories, using spatial analysis and geostatistical tools, in order to characterise different forms of exposure and identify spatial structures;
3) to define and map crisis and alert areas based on homogeneous forms of exposure, to help risk and crisis managers anticipate and plan for crises.

We put forward the hypothesis that 1) different forms of exposure could emerge, making it possible to analyse the conditions of these forms for both explanatory purposes (which territorial factors explain this or that form of exposure) and predictive purposes (how can forms of exposure be generalised to other European territories); 2) the mapping of crisis and alert zones will reveal an irregular mesh over French territory, and the measurement of these differential granularity of crisis areas would make it possible to identify scale laws and extend the results to other territories.