Comprehensive multi-hazard risk assessment in data-scarce regions. A study focused on Burundi

Delves, Jess; Renner, Kathrin; Campalani, Piero; Piñón, Jesica; Schneiderbauer, Stefan; Steger, Stefan; Moreno, Mateo; Oterino, Maria Belen Benito; Perez, Eduardo; Pittore, Massimiliano

doi:10.5194/egusphere-2024-3445

Preprints

https://doi.org/10.5194/egusphere-2024-3445

Preprints

21 Jan 2025

| 21 Jan 2025

Comprehensive multi-hazard risk assessment in data-scarce regions. A study focused on Burundi

Jess Delves, Kathrin Renner, Piero Campalani, Jesica Piñón, Stefan Schneiderbauer, Stefan Steger, Mateo Moreno, Maria Belen Benito Oterino, Eduardo Perez, and Massimiliano Pittore

Abstract. The increased occurrence of multiple cascading and compounding hazards underlines the importance of integrated- and multi-hazard-based assessment approaches for the development of thorough strategies towards disaster resilience. To this purpose, a national-scale multi-hazard risk assessment was conducted between September 2020 and December 2021 for Burundi, focusing on the natural hazards flooding, torrential rains, landslides, earthquakes, and strong winds. This integrated multi-hazard assessment resulted in comparable nationwide provincial and commune-scale Annual Average Loss (AAL) values, further aggregated to provide a preliminary estimate of the resulting overall risk. Historical climatology (1990–2019) was computed, and a preliminary evaluation of the potential effects of climate change in the future period (2020–2049) was carried out. Data availability and reliability were challenging throughout the whole assessment and were tackled by integrating local authoritative sources with international and global resources. An up-to-date exposure model was implemented and complemented by an indicator-based socioeconomic vulnerability assessment. Furthermore, a data-driven statistical susceptibility model for shallow landslides has been derived at national scale. The consequent multi-hazard risk assessment provides an approximate picture of the expected nationwide risk distribution in economic terms. The results should support the identification of priority areas and actions for disaster risk management.

Received: 05 Nov 2024 – Discussion started: 21 Jan 2025

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Journal article(s) based on this preprint

16 Mar 2026

Comprehensive multi-hazard risk assessment in data-scarce regions – a study focused on Burundi

Jess L. Delves, Kathrin Renner, Piero Campalani, Jesica Piñon, Stefan Schneiderbauer, Mateo Moreno, Maria Belen Benito Oterino, Eduardo Perez, and Massimiliano Pittore

Nat. Hazards Earth Syst. Sci., 26, 1347–1373, https://doi.org/10.5194/nhess-26-1347-2026,https://doi.org/10.5194/nhess-26-1347-2026, 2026

Short summary

Jess Delves, Kathrin Renner, Piero Campalani, Jesica Piñón, Stefan Schneiderbauer, Stefan Steger, Mateo Moreno, Maria Belen Benito Oterino, Eduardo Perez, and Massimiliano Pittore

Interactive discussion

Status: closed

RC1:
'Comment on egusphere-2024-3445', Olivier Dewitte, 14 Mar 2025

My review can be found in the attached PDF.

Citation: https://doi.org/10.5194/egusphere-2024-3445-RC1
- AC1: 'Manuscript - Comprehensive multi-hazard risk assessment in data-scarce regions. A study focused on Burundi - Reply on RC1', Kathrin Renner, 17 Jul 2025
  
  Dear Mr. Olivier Dewitte,
  Thank you very much for your comprehensive review and the helpful comments to improve our paper. We have revised the manuscript accordingly, conducted additional analyses where required, and prepared supplementary material and responded to all your comments.
  Please find attached our detailed responses and the additional material produced.
  If you have any further questions, we would be happy to discuss them.
  Kind regards,
  
  Kathrin Renner (on behalf of all co-authors)
  
  Citation: https://doi.org/10.5194/egusphere-2024-3445-AC1
RC2:
'Comment on egusphere-2024-3445', Anonymous Referee #2, 01 Apr 2025

My review can be found in the attached PDF.

Citation: https://doi.org/10.5194/egusphere-2024-3445-RC2
- AC3: 'Review response - Comprehensive multi-hazard risk assessment in data-scarce regions. A study focused on Burundi - Reply on RC2', Kathrin Renner, 17 Jul 2025
  
  Dear Reviewer of EGUSPHERE-2024-3445 research article,
  Thank you very much for your comprehensive review and the helpful comments to improve our paper. We have revised the manuscript accordingly, conducted additional analyses where required, and prepared supplementary material and responded to all your comments.
  Please find attached our detailed responses and the additional material produced.
  If you have any further questions, we would be happy to discuss them.
  Kind regards,
  
  Kathrin Renner (on behalf of all co-authors)
  
  Citation: https://doi.org/10.5194/egusphere-2024-3445-AC3
RC3:
'Comment on egusphere-2024-3445', Anonymous Referee #3, 07 Apr 2025
Dear co-authors and Robert Šakić Trogrlić (editor),
Thank you for submitting your engaging manuscript, titled “Comprehensive multi-hazard risk assessment in data-scarce regions. A study focused on Burundi”. The paper presents a multi-component methodology for assessing multi-hazard risk in the context of Burundi, with potential applications to other data-scarce contexts.
I believe that the manuscript makes a useful contribution to the disaster risk reduction (DRR) landscape in Burundi through the application of multiple quantitative (as well as a brief mention of qualitative) methods. However, I agree with Reviewers 1 and 2 that the manuscript would benefit from restructuring and integrating the findings into the broader literature, including the implications for existing DRR policies and practices in Burundi. Additionally, to increase the relevance and uptake of the paper, I recommend that the authors engage with local experts and practitioners to refine the methods used in generating the multi-hazard map (Figure 12). Further details are expanded upon below.
Agreeing with the major-level comments provided by Reviewers 1 and 2, I have focused this review on medium- and minor-scale comments. I advise the following amendments:
Medium-level amendments
The discussion (Section 9) currently reads more like a results section; please integrate the findings into the existing literature. I recommend the following:
Examine how your findings contribute to existing knowledge of Burundi’s risk context and the implications of your multi-hazard risk assessment for developing current DRR strategies.

Offer practical suggestions on how your multi-hazard risk assessment can be integrated into existing DRR policies and practices in Burundi. I recommend that this involves consultation and knowledge exchange with local experts and practitioners to identify individual methods that can be refined, thereby strengthening the multi-hazard map (Figure 12). This engagement could be online if appropriate.

In the additional material, please include the model code and numerical results for each component of the methods. In addition, please list the questions used in the semi-structured interviews and focus groups for the socio-economic vulnerability assessment.

I recognise that you have described the limitations of the research throughout the methodology. However, I believe the discussion could be enriched with a summary of these limitations and how you plan to address these in future work.

Figures
General: Include the geographical area of focus in each figure caption (e.g., Burundi, Cibitoke province). This is valuable if a figure is viewed outside the context of the manuscript/paper.
Figure 1: Can the topographical categories (i.e., colours) be differentiated more clearly?
Figure 2: Be consistent with capitalisation in the figure.
Figure 4: Add north arrows and scale bars to each panel in the figure.
Figure 10: State what I, II, IIIa, IIIb, IVa, and IVb refer to in the figure caption.
Figure 11: Add units to the colline and provincial vulnerability scales. Please amend the typo as follows: “…population density increase 2050…”.
Figure 12: Include a north arrow and scale bar on at least one of the seven panels. Can you increase the resolution of this figure?
Figure 15: The final line in the figure caption is unclear: “…different global and return periods.” Should this be “…different global and ___ return periods.”?
Sections
Section 2.1, Line 93: Include the threshold criteria used in EM-DAT to determine what disaster events are recorded.
Section 2.1, Line 93: To aid the reader’s understanding of the challenges posed by hazard data scarcity in the context of Burundi, it would be useful to include a figure or table comparing the impact data documented across EM-DAT and the IOM’s Displacement Tracking Matrix (DTM) platform.
Section 5.1, Line 142: Why was the 99^th percentile of the time series chosen as the threshold for the Peak-Over-Threshold (POT) method?
Section 5.2, Lines 169-175: What is the source/are the sources of this information on the 64 flood events between 2000 and 2020?
Section 5.2, Line 180: Be cautious with acronyms: here, I presume DTM refers to digital terrain model; however, you previously defined DTM in the context of the IOM’s Displacement Tracking Matrix (DTM) platform in Section 2.1, Line 101.
Section 5.3.2, Line 228: Explain why you chose a heterogeneous Poisson Process model to address the lack of multi-temporal information in landslide observations.
Section 5.3.2, Line 235: What specific aspects of Corominas and Moya (2008) did you apply to determine the parameters of the power-law frequency-size distribution?
Section 5.4, Line 255: Provide a reference for the statement “…RP 475, which is considered the most representative return period for this hazard…”.
Section 6.1, Lines 271-272: Provide references for the following sentence: “The population in Burundi has grown from around 8 million people in 2008 (year of the last census) to around 12 million people in 2019 (projection of the National Statistics office).”
Section 6.2, Line 298: Quantify this “good match” between the results and the projections for 2019.
Section 6.3, Lines 308-310: Is there a method of validating this “mostly visual accuracy assessment”?
Section 7.1.2, Line 329: Add a brief justification for why the “HAZUS scheme from Kircher et al. (2006)” was the most appropriate choice for assigning the capacity curves.
Section 7.2, Line 356: Provide a reference for the following statement: “…an INFORM subnational risk assessment in Burundi was published in 2020…”.
Section 11, Lines 513-514: Expand on this sentence detailing the stakeholder engagement: “To mitigate this, it was attempted to validate the conceptual approach and data sources with local experts, but this was limited due to the difficulty in engaging relevant informants.”. This could be mitigated by expanding the discussion to include future work.
Minor amendments and typos
Section 5.3.2, Line 228: Change “landside” to “landslide”.
Section 6, Line 265: Mismatched parenthesis: “(see (Campalani et al., 2023)”
Section 6, Lines 264-265: The text could be rewritten to read, “Key exposure information considered in this study includes population, residential buildings, and cultivated areas; additional information on infrastructure was also collected (see Campalani et al., 2023).”
Section 6, Line 266: Should “local authoritative sources” be rewritten as “local authority sources”?
Section 6.1, Line 273: Change “In order to provide a realistic representation of current population distribution…” to “In order to provide a realistic representation of the current population distribution…”.
Section 6.1, Line 277 and in Figure 7: Change “Worldpop” to “WorldPop”.
Section 6.2, Line 287: Change “provided” to “providing”.
Section 6.2, Line 285: You have said “based on the following two information sources” and then listed three information sources.
Section 6.2, Line 291: The hyphen in “construction-types” is not necessary.
Section 6.2, Line 198: Change “…distribution data was…” to “…distribution data were…”.
Section 8, Line 397: Be consistent with UK or US spellings throughout the manuscript. Here you have written “color-coded” but on Lines 472 and 481 you have “colours”.
Section 9, Line 430: “…as expected giving the concentration of assets…” should be “…as expected given the concentration of assets…”. The same typo is present in Section 11, Line 498; please check elsewhere in the manuscript.
Section 10, Line 447: Change “national and subnational scale” to “national and subnational scales”.
Section 10, Line 451: Change “…assumes as baseline…” to “…assumes as a baseline…”
Section 11, Line 493: Please add the missing parenthesis: “…(in terms of their uppermost percentile of overlapping natural hazards.”.
Section 11, Line 495: Please change “intense precipitations” to “intense precipitation”.
Section 11, Lines 495-497: This sentence does not quite make sense, please alter: “A more comprehensive multi-hazard risk assessment was carried out, in terms of economic impact and also considering exposure and vulnerability, a different picture emerged.”
Section 11, Lines 504-505: Please remove the “on” in the phrase: “…and on consultations with…”.
Section 11, Line 528: Please change “…above 90th percentile” to “…above the 90percentile…”.
___
Many thanks for the time and effort spent in producing this manuscript. I hope that my comments will be helpful, and I wish you the best during the revision process.
Regards, Reviewer 3
Citation: https://doi.org/10.5194/egusphere-2024-3445-RC3
- AC2: 'Review response - Comprehensive multi-hazard risk assessment in data-scarce regions. A study focused on Burundi - Reply on RC3', Kathrin Renner, 17 Jul 2025
  
  Dear Reviewer of EGUSPHERE-2024-3445 research article,
  Thank you very much for your comprehensive review and the helpful comments to improve our paper. We have revised the manuscript accordingly, conducted additional analyses where required, and prepared supplementary material and responded to all your comments.
  Please find attached our detailed responses and the additional material produced.
  If you have any further questions, we would be happy to discuss them.
  Kind regards,
  
  Kathrin Renner (on behalf of all co-authors)
  
  Citation: https://doi.org/10.5194/egusphere-2024-3445-AC2

Interactive discussion

Status: closed

RC1:
'Comment on egusphere-2024-3445', Olivier Dewitte, 14 Mar 2025

My review can be found in the attached PDF.

Citation: https://doi.org/10.5194/egusphere-2024-3445-RC1
- AC1: 'Manuscript - Comprehensive multi-hazard risk assessment in data-scarce regions. A study focused on Burundi - Reply on RC1', Kathrin Renner, 17 Jul 2025
  
  Dear Mr. Olivier Dewitte,
  Thank you very much for your comprehensive review and the helpful comments to improve our paper. We have revised the manuscript accordingly, conducted additional analyses where required, and prepared supplementary material and responded to all your comments.
  Please find attached our detailed responses and the additional material produced.
  If you have any further questions, we would be happy to discuss them.
  Kind regards,
  
  Kathrin Renner (on behalf of all co-authors)
  
  Citation: https://doi.org/10.5194/egusphere-2024-3445-AC1
RC2:
'Comment on egusphere-2024-3445', Anonymous Referee #2, 01 Apr 2025

My review can be found in the attached PDF.

Citation: https://doi.org/10.5194/egusphere-2024-3445-RC2
- AC3: 'Review response - Comprehensive multi-hazard risk assessment in data-scarce regions. A study focused on Burundi - Reply on RC2', Kathrin Renner, 17 Jul 2025
  
  Dear Reviewer of EGUSPHERE-2024-3445 research article,
  Thank you very much for your comprehensive review and the helpful comments to improve our paper. We have revised the manuscript accordingly, conducted additional analyses where required, and prepared supplementary material and responded to all your comments.
  Please find attached our detailed responses and the additional material produced.
  If you have any further questions, we would be happy to discuss them.
  Kind regards,
  
  Kathrin Renner (on behalf of all co-authors)
  
  Citation: https://doi.org/10.5194/egusphere-2024-3445-AC3
RC3:
'Comment on egusphere-2024-3445', Anonymous Referee #3, 07 Apr 2025
Dear co-authors and Robert Šakić Trogrlić (editor),
Thank you for submitting your engaging manuscript, titled “Comprehensive multi-hazard risk assessment in data-scarce regions. A study focused on Burundi”. The paper presents a multi-component methodology for assessing multi-hazard risk in the context of Burundi, with potential applications to other data-scarce contexts.
I believe that the manuscript makes a useful contribution to the disaster risk reduction (DRR) landscape in Burundi through the application of multiple quantitative (as well as a brief mention of qualitative) methods. However, I agree with Reviewers 1 and 2 that the manuscript would benefit from restructuring and integrating the findings into the broader literature, including the implications for existing DRR policies and practices in Burundi. Additionally, to increase the relevance and uptake of the paper, I recommend that the authors engage with local experts and practitioners to refine the methods used in generating the multi-hazard map (Figure 12). Further details are expanded upon below.
Agreeing with the major-level comments provided by Reviewers 1 and 2, I have focused this review on medium- and minor-scale comments. I advise the following amendments:
Medium-level amendments
The discussion (Section 9) currently reads more like a results section; please integrate the findings into the existing literature. I recommend the following:
Examine how your findings contribute to existing knowledge of Burundi’s risk context and the implications of your multi-hazard risk assessment for developing current DRR strategies.

Offer practical suggestions on how your multi-hazard risk assessment can be integrated into existing DRR policies and practices in Burundi. I recommend that this involves consultation and knowledge exchange with local experts and practitioners to identify individual methods that can be refined, thereby strengthening the multi-hazard map (Figure 12). This engagement could be online if appropriate.

In the additional material, please include the model code and numerical results for each component of the methods. In addition, please list the questions used in the semi-structured interviews and focus groups for the socio-economic vulnerability assessment.

I recognise that you have described the limitations of the research throughout the methodology. However, I believe the discussion could be enriched with a summary of these limitations and how you plan to address these in future work.

Figures
General: Include the geographical area of focus in each figure caption (e.g., Burundi, Cibitoke province). This is valuable if a figure is viewed outside the context of the manuscript/paper.
Figure 1: Can the topographical categories (i.e., colours) be differentiated more clearly?
Figure 2: Be consistent with capitalisation in the figure.
Figure 4: Add north arrows and scale bars to each panel in the figure.
Figure 10: State what I, II, IIIa, IIIb, IVa, and IVb refer to in the figure caption.
Figure 11: Add units to the colline and provincial vulnerability scales. Please amend the typo as follows: “…population density increase 2050…”.
Figure 12: Include a north arrow and scale bar on at least one of the seven panels. Can you increase the resolution of this figure?
Figure 15: The final line in the figure caption is unclear: “…different global and return periods.” Should this be “…different global and ___ return periods.”?
Sections
Section 2.1, Line 93: Include the threshold criteria used in EM-DAT to determine what disaster events are recorded.
Section 2.1, Line 93: To aid the reader’s understanding of the challenges posed by hazard data scarcity in the context of Burundi, it would be useful to include a figure or table comparing the impact data documented across EM-DAT and the IOM’s Displacement Tracking Matrix (DTM) platform.
Section 5.1, Line 142: Why was the 99^th percentile of the time series chosen as the threshold for the Peak-Over-Threshold (POT) method?
Section 5.2, Lines 169-175: What is the source/are the sources of this information on the 64 flood events between 2000 and 2020?
Section 5.2, Line 180: Be cautious with acronyms: here, I presume DTM refers to digital terrain model; however, you previously defined DTM in the context of the IOM’s Displacement Tracking Matrix (DTM) platform in Section 2.1, Line 101.
Section 5.3.2, Line 228: Explain why you chose a heterogeneous Poisson Process model to address the lack of multi-temporal information in landslide observations.
Section 5.3.2, Line 235: What specific aspects of Corominas and Moya (2008) did you apply to determine the parameters of the power-law frequency-size distribution?
Section 5.4, Line 255: Provide a reference for the statement “…RP 475, which is considered the most representative return period for this hazard…”.
Section 6.1, Lines 271-272: Provide references for the following sentence: “The population in Burundi has grown from around 8 million people in 2008 (year of the last census) to around 12 million people in 2019 (projection of the National Statistics office).”
Section 6.2, Line 298: Quantify this “good match” between the results and the projections for 2019.
Section 6.3, Lines 308-310: Is there a method of validating this “mostly visual accuracy assessment”?
Section 7.1.2, Line 329: Add a brief justification for why the “HAZUS scheme from Kircher et al. (2006)” was the most appropriate choice for assigning the capacity curves.
Section 7.2, Line 356: Provide a reference for the following statement: “…an INFORM subnational risk assessment in Burundi was published in 2020…”.
Section 11, Lines 513-514: Expand on this sentence detailing the stakeholder engagement: “To mitigate this, it was attempted to validate the conceptual approach and data sources with local experts, but this was limited due to the difficulty in engaging relevant informants.”. This could be mitigated by expanding the discussion to include future work.
Minor amendments and typos
Section 5.3.2, Line 228: Change “landside” to “landslide”.
Section 6, Line 265: Mismatched parenthesis: “(see (Campalani et al., 2023)”
Section 6, Lines 264-265: The text could be rewritten to read, “Key exposure information considered in this study includes population, residential buildings, and cultivated areas; additional information on infrastructure was also collected (see Campalani et al., 2023).”
Section 6, Line 266: Should “local authoritative sources” be rewritten as “local authority sources”?
Section 6.1, Line 273: Change “In order to provide a realistic representation of current population distribution…” to “In order to provide a realistic representation of the current population distribution…”.
Section 6.1, Line 277 and in Figure 7: Change “Worldpop” to “WorldPop”.
Section 6.2, Line 287: Change “provided” to “providing”.
Section 6.2, Line 285: You have said “based on the following two information sources” and then listed three information sources.
Section 6.2, Line 291: The hyphen in “construction-types” is not necessary.
Section 6.2, Line 198: Change “…distribution data was…” to “…distribution data were…”.
Section 8, Line 397: Be consistent with UK or US spellings throughout the manuscript. Here you have written “color-coded” but on Lines 472 and 481 you have “colours”.
Section 9, Line 430: “…as expected giving the concentration of assets…” should be “…as expected given the concentration of assets…”. The same typo is present in Section 11, Line 498; please check elsewhere in the manuscript.
Section 10, Line 447: Change “national and subnational scale” to “national and subnational scales”.
Section 10, Line 451: Change “…assumes as baseline…” to “…assumes as a baseline…”
Section 11, Line 493: Please add the missing parenthesis: “…(in terms of their uppermost percentile of overlapping natural hazards.”.
Section 11, Line 495: Please change “intense precipitations” to “intense precipitation”.
Section 11, Lines 495-497: This sentence does not quite make sense, please alter: “A more comprehensive multi-hazard risk assessment was carried out, in terms of economic impact and also considering exposure and vulnerability, a different picture emerged.”
Section 11, Lines 504-505: Please remove the “on” in the phrase: “…and on consultations with…”.
Section 11, Line 528: Please change “…above 90th percentile” to “…above the 90percentile…”.
___
Many thanks for the time and effort spent in producing this manuscript. I hope that my comments will be helpful, and I wish you the best during the revision process.
Regards, Reviewer 3
Citation: https://doi.org/10.5194/egusphere-2024-3445-RC3
- AC2: 'Review response - Comprehensive multi-hazard risk assessment in data-scarce regions. A study focused on Burundi - Reply on RC3', Kathrin Renner, 17 Jul 2025
  
  Dear Reviewer of EGUSPHERE-2024-3445 research article,
  Thank you very much for your comprehensive review and the helpful comments to improve our paper. We have revised the manuscript accordingly, conducted additional analyses where required, and prepared supplementary material and responded to all your comments.
  Please find attached our detailed responses and the additional material produced.
  If you have any further questions, we would be happy to discuss them.
  Kind regards,
  
  Kathrin Renner (on behalf of all co-authors)
  
  Citation: https://doi.org/10.5194/egusphere-2024-3445-AC2

Peer review completion

AR – Author's response | RR – Referee report | ED – Editor decision | EF – Editorial file upload

ED: Reconsider after major revisions (further review by editor and referees) (28 Jul 2025) by Robert Sakic Trogrlic

AR by Kathrin Renner on behalf of the Authors (22 Aug 2025) Author's response

EF by Vitaly Muravyev (22 Aug 2025) Author's tracked changes

EF by Vitaly Muravyev (25 Aug 2025) Manuscript

ED: Referee Nomination & Report Request started (28 Aug 2025) by Robert Sakic Trogrlic

RR by Anonymous Referee #2 (28 Aug 2025)

RR by Anonymous Referee #4 (29 Dec 2025)

Suggestions for revision or reasons for rejection

The paper “Comprehensive multi-hazard risk assessment in data-scarce regions. A study focused on Burundi” by Delves et al. presents a study focusing on different type of hazards, and the associated risk evaluated in Burundi. The paper is focused on an area which is highly underrepresented and whereby information is difficult to retrieve. For this reason, the paper is worth being published. However, there should be substantial changes before publication. The very first is that the multi-hazard analysis is performed using a frequentist approach based on the results of “single hazards” procedure. This may affect the results and it should be declared at the very beginning, outlining very clearly which is the procedure that will be followed. For instance, the workflow depicted at the beginning does not represent the entire procedure, so the reader cannot understand the aim of the list of each single hazard.
Results should be presented in a consistent manner, and for instance showing close up of the areas most affected by a specific hazard.
The Authors assess the risk associated with each hazard and then write about the socio-economic vulnerability. The risk is estimated using the vulnerability of the population and the buildings to each hazard. Therefore, it seems a bit out of context to talk again about vulnerability. Maybe the Authors refer to the fact that those socio-economic vulnerabilities exacerbate the impact of those hazards. I’d kindly suggest rephrasing and to re-think about the way in which results are presented.
The number of figures presented is too high and some of them are not crucial, I’d suggest replacing them with sentences.
Finally, I’d kindly suggest to provide the readers information on the broad perspective of the paper and its final aim for scholars but also for stakeholders.
More comments are reported below together with the page where problem appears.
Figure 3: there are many figures in the paper, so I kindly suggest choosing only those that are informative, while the others may be represented by text. In this case, the two figures present two different information, however, the area is very large and the data is jeopardized, I wonder whether it would be better to use only one figure and to synthetize the data in sentences without using the figures.
In Figure 4 you present the commune-scale building taxonomies distribution maps of Bujumbura Marie and Cibitoke, however, you are interested in a larger scale analysis, so there is a difference in scale between this figure and the actual data you’ll use. I kindly suggest reporting the data in a couple of sentences without using the Figure.
p.12, there is a reference reporting an error “(Figure 5Error! Reference source not found.)”
Figure 6 is of poor quality and layout, I kindly encourage you to provide the law of the equations, without the need of reporting the plots. You have already many figures.
p.14, the “Risk analysis” subsection header is without numbering. It reports information not clearly. Indeed, it is not clear the workflow to assess the risk, and it is not clear how this section is linked to the previous whereby the hazard is estimated
p.15 “Information on 64 flood events that occurred between 2000 and 2020 was collected and analysed, collected from international databases from European Commission, Flood List, Darmouth Flood Observatory, International Committee of Red Cross, Global Flood Modelling and Earth Engine” can you please provide the website whereby you accessed the information and date of access?
Figure 7: from the results it seems that only some areas are flood prone and also they are vulnerable because of the presence of people. I’d kindly suggest making a close up on those areas only and do not show the entire area
p. 16: “The elaboration of the hydrological precipitation-runoff model was carried out using the Hec-HMS software developed at the Hydrologic Engineering Centre (HEC) of the US Army Corps of Engineers.” Which is the input you used and how did you calibrate the model? Did you prepare one model only for the entire area or did you subdivide the rivers? Please provide more information on this procedure.
p.17: “The hydrological model was employed to estimate the recurrent precipitation for five selected catchment basins, for which IDF curves for each considered return period were developed” can you please provide more details on the data used to estimate the IDFs?
p.17: the procedure explained here refer to the assessment of the hazard related to the flood events and not to the risk that is estimated by multiplying the hazard by the exposure by the vulnerability.
p.18: “by (Nibigira et al., 2013) including a subset of landslide information published by (Broeckx et al., 2018)” please note that in case of citation in the text, you should write “by Nibigira et al. (2013)…. by Broeckx et al. (2018)”
p.19: “Figure 9Error! Reference source not found.” Please check the reference source
p.19: can you provide a reference source for the Poisson process model used? Please consider adding more information on the data and the uncertainty
p.20: “Furthermore, it was necessary to characterise the distribution of event intensity, which in the case of shallow landslides can be …. The determination of the appropriate scaling law would require a more consistent dataset. However, it was deemed that a fixed 425 power exponent of -2.3 was a plausible estimate. This is for instance the mean value (std dev:0.56) of a set of 27 global inventories including events triggered by rainfall, snowmelt and earthquakes described by (Van Den Eeckhaut et al., 2007) (see also Tebbens, 2020). A minimum event size of 100 m² has been chosen to exclude small events within the roll-over of the distribution.” Can you please provide more information on the law you are using and the suitability to the case study analysed and how did you estimate the parameters?
Figure 11: despite this information is interesting, it would be helpful to have it for the areas whereby the analysis has been performed, since some hazards are analysed at the local scale. As it is, the information on the social vulnerability is not linked to the rest of the analyses. See also comment at the beginning of the review.
Pag. 29: “multi-hazard map”, can you please clarify whether you are talking about hazard or risk? It may be confusing, since in the following sentence you write “This representation indicates several potential risk hotspots”, thus talking about risk and not hazard

Hide

ED: Publish subject to minor revisions (review by editor) (07 Jan 2026) by Robert Sakic Trogrlic

AR by Kathrin Renner on behalf of the Authors (27 Jan 2026) Author's response

EF by Mario Ebel (27 Jan 2026) Manuscript Author's tracked changes

ED: Publish subject to technical corrections (02 Feb 2026) by Robert Sakic Trogrlic

AR by Kathrin Renner on behalf of the Authors (03 Feb 2026) Manuscript

Journal article(s) based on this preprint

16 Mar 2026

Comprehensive multi-hazard risk assessment in data-scarce regions – a study focused on Burundi

Jess L. Delves, Kathrin Renner, Piero Campalani, Jesica Piñon, Stefan Schneiderbauer, Mateo Moreno, Maria Belen Benito Oterino, Eduardo Perez, and Massimiliano Pittore

Nat. Hazards Earth Syst. Sci., 26, 1347–1373, https://doi.org/10.5194/nhess-26-1347-2026,https://doi.org/10.5194/nhess-26-1347-2026, 2026

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Jess Delves, Kathrin Renner, Piero Campalani, Jesica Piñón, Stefan Schneiderbauer, Stefan Steger, Mateo Moreno, Maria Belen Benito Oterino, Eduardo Perez, and Massimiliano Pittore

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Month	HTML	PDF	XML	Total
Jan 2025	73	16	5	94
Feb 2025	34	19	0	53
Mar 2025	43	4	1	48
Apr 2025	52	17	3	72
May 2025	22	3	1	26
Jun 2025	26	11	4	41
Jul 2025	55	15	3	73
Aug 2025	100	30	2	132
Sep 2025	442	15	4	461
Oct 2025	30	6	2	38
Nov 2025	22	27	3	52
Dec 2025	30	54	3	87
Jan 2026	56	29	4	89
Feb 2026	34	52	2	88
Mar 2026	22	31	0	53

Cumulative views and downloads (calculated since 21 Jan 2025)

Month	HTML	PDF	XML	Total
Jan 2025	73	16	5	94
Feb 2025	34	19	0	53
Mar 2025	43	4	1	48
Apr 2025	52	17	3	72
May 2025	22	3	1	26
Jun 2025	26	11	4	41
Jul 2025	55	15	3	73
Aug 2025	100	30	2	132
Sep 2025	442	15	4	461
Oct 2025	30	6	2	38
Nov 2025	22	27	3	52
Dec 2025	30	54	3	87
Jan 2026	56	29	4	89
Feb 2026	34	52	2	88
Mar 2026	22	31	0	53

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Total article views: 1,385 (including HTML, PDF, and XML) Thereof 1,385 with geography defined and 0 with unknown origin.

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The requested preprint has a corresponding peer-reviewed final revised paper. You are encouraged to refer to the final revised version.

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This scientific paper presents a multi-hazard risk assessment for Burundi, focusing on flooding, torrential rains, landslides, earthquakes, and strong winds. The study identifies key risk hotspots with estimated economic losses of 92 million USD (2.5 % of GDP). Climate change projections indicate increased precipitation. The paper highlights data limitations and stresses the need for improved hazard models and the consideration of compounding risks in future assessments.


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