WSL Institute for Snow and Avalanche Research SLF

The 15th DACH Permafrost Conference will take place in Davos from January 8 to 10, 2025. The meeting is organized by the SLF Permafrost Research Group. The SLF is a research institute conducting solution-oriented research on natural hazards, mountain ecosystems, and snow and ice in a changing world.

The WSL research program CCAMM – Climate Change Impacts on Alpine Mass Movements promotes inter- and transdisciplinary research aimed at enhancing the knowledge base on the risks associated with natural hazards and how best to address them. The program focuses on five overarching key topics: Hazard Disposition, Dynamics, Risk and Adaptation, Cascading Processes, and Early Warning.

Despite increasing scientific knowledge and the implementation of hazard and risk management strategies, mountain societies continue to be affected by high loss events (e.g. events Grison, Valais, Ticino in the summer 2024). The lecture will present focused studies on challenges of risk management under changing climatic conditions, extremes and cascading events as well as their interactions.

In recent years, the availability of Earth observation data from satellites has increased dramatically, allowing for systematic and global monitoring of Earth's surface processes at an unprecedented scale. These advancements hold significant relevance even for countries with highly developed terrestrial and airborne monitoring systems as they enhance our understanding of, for instance, various types of mass movements in high mountains.