The research, published in Environmental and Sustainability Indicators, was conducted by Herfita Rizki Hasanah Gurning of IPB University and colleagues, who set out to answer a question that has largely been overlooked in previous work: do provinces with strong marine economies also possess the economic, social and environmental capacities needed to sustain them, and are comparatively developed provinces actually making full use of their marine potential? Earlier studies had tended to treat regional development simply as economic growth or environmental carrying capacity, rather than as a distinct, multidimensional system in its own right.

To build a comparable sample, the team first used K-medoids clustering on data from 34 Indonesian provinces covering 2019 to 2023, drawing on indicators of marine and brackishwater fisheries intensity, marine transport intensity, marine tourism intensity and the share of coastal villages. The two-cluster solution proved statistically strongest, with the highest Silhouette Coefficient of 0.448 and the lowest Davies-Bouldin Index of 0.761, and it kept a balanced minimum cluster size of 14 provinces. Twenty provinces emerged with comparatively high marine economic intensity, and these formed the analytical sample. Notably, the researchers measured marine subsector contributions against non-mining gross regional domestic product, a deliberate choice to avoid distorting results in provinces where extractive industries dominate headline output figures.

The study then applied Grey Relational Analysis, a technique well suited to settings where comprehensive provincial marine data are scarce, to construct a Marine Economy Performance Index and a Regional Development Performance Index for each province in 2019 and 2023. The marine economy index captured economic scale, economic structure and economic efficiency, while the regional development index combined economic indicators such as non-mining growth and unemployment, social indicators including poverty, the Human Development Index and the Gini ratio, and environmental measures comprising a composite environmental quality index and a disaster risk index from Indonesia’s National Disaster Management Authority.

The results reveal a striking divergence between the two systems. Average marine economic performance barely moved, slipping from 0.55 in 2019 to 0.54 in 2023, while average regional development performance rose from 0.56 to 0.62. Within the marine economy, the structure dimension improved markedly, from 0.60 to 0.65, reflecting diversification away from primary fisheries dependence and stronger marine tourism, but the efficiency dimension fell from 0.53 to 0.44 as capture fisheries and aquaculture productivity weakened across many provinces. Bali made the most dramatic climb, rising from twelfth to second place in marine economic performance as its structure score reached a perfect 1.00, while North Maluku held first place with its efficiency dimension hitting the ideal value. At the other extreme, DKI Jakarta plummeted from sixth to twentieth as its productivity scores collapsed.

Regional development told a different story. Bali rose from third to first place with an index of 0.77, Riau Islands held second, and West Nusa Tenggara and North Sulawesi posted some of the largest gains. The economic dimension improved most, from 0.59 to 0.67, and the environmental dimension rose from 0.54 to 0.61, but the social dimension advanced only modestly, from 0.54 to 0.58. That slower social progress matters, the authors argue, because economic and environmental gains in coastal regions do not automatically translate into improvements in welfare, inclusion or human development, and unequal benefit distribution remains a persistent challenge in marine-dependent communities.

The core of the analysis lies in the coupling coordination degree, a measure that combines the proportional balance between the two indices with their overall development level. Average coordination improved only slightly, from 0.74 in 2019 to 0.76 in 2023, leaving most provinces in the intermediate coupling range of 0.7 to 0.8. No province reached the high-quality coupling category, defined as 0.9 or above. Bali and North Maluku entered the good coupling range, at 0.85, after improving both subsystems simultaneously, while Aceh moved up from primary to intermediate coupling. By contrast, North Kalimantan slipped from good to intermediate coordination, and DKI Jakarta showed the sharpest imbalance, with regional development improving even as marine economic performance declined sharply. No province recorded the reverse pattern of rising marine performance alongside falling regional development.

To pinpoint what was holding coordination back, the team deployed an Obstacle Degree Model using entropy weights, which quantifies how far each indicator sits from its ideal state and how much it constrains the system overall. The findings were unambiguous. The marine economy subsystem accounted for 65.43 percent of the total obstacle degree in 2019, rising to 68.25 percent in 2023. Within it, the productivity of marine and brackishwater aquaculture was the single largest obstacle, growing from 28.93 percent to 30.27 percent, followed by the contribution of marine transportation to regional output, which climbed from 14.66 percent to 17.34 percent. Together these two indicators accounted for nearly half of all constraints by 2023, and their dominance intensified over the study period.

The provincial heatmaps add important nuance. Aquaculture productivity was especially problematic in North Kalimantan and the Riau Islands, where its obstacle degree exceeded 40 percent, while marine transportation was the dominant constraint in Bali despite the island’s overall gains. In North Maluku, disaster risk emerged as the leading obstacle in 2023, showing that even provinces with strong coordination can carry acute vulnerabilities in a single dimension. Prior research suggests aquaculture performance is often limited by capital constraints, high feed costs, disease outbreaks, declining water quality and unreliable electricity, while Indonesia’s maritime transport challenges include limited port capacity, weak intermodal connectivity and insufficient institutional coordination, though the study itself is diagnostic rather than causal and does not identify which mechanisms operate in each province.

The policy implications are concrete. The authors argue that provincial governments should prioritize aquaculture productivity through better production technology, water-quality and disease management, infrastructure, and access to capital; strengthen the economic role of marine transportation through port capacity, logistics and intermodal connectivity; and embed disaster-risk reduction more systematically into coastal planning. Just as importantly, because the obstacle structure differs from province to province, a uniform national approach is unlikely to work. Provinces where both systems improved need policies that consolidate gains, while those with stagnant or declining marine performance need targeted interventions. As Indonesia pushes its blue economy agenda across a fragmented archipelago, the study suggests that converting marine potential into broad-based regional benefit depends less on expanding production than on fixing the specific, measurable bottlenecks — above all pond productivity and maritime connectivity — that keep the sea and the shore from developing together.

Subject of Research: Coupling coordination between marine economy performance and regional development across coastal Indonesian provinces

Article Title: Coupling coordination and obstacle analysis of the marine economy and regional development: Evidence from coastal Indonesia

Article References: Gurning, H. R. H., Fauzi, A., Rustiadi, E., & Pravitasari, A. E. (2026). Coupling coordination and obstacle analysis of the marine economy and regional development: Evidence from coastal Indonesia. Environmental and Sustainability Indicators, 32, Article 101513. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.indic.2026.101513

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1016/j.indic.2026.101513

Keywords: Indonesia, marine economy, regional development, aquaculture productivity, coupling coordination degree, marine transportation, coastal provinces, blue economy, Grey Relational Analysis, obstacle degree model, disaster risk, sustainable development

The study is built on the sixth phase of the Coupled Model Intercomparison Project, known as CMIP6, using statistically downscaled daily precipitation data at a resolution of 0.25 degrees, roughly 25 kilometers. Rather than simply counting days above a rainfall threshold, the team employed a percentile-based spatiotemporal event-identification approach, which treats extreme precipitation as coherent events unfolding across both space and time. This matters because flood damage is driven not by isolated wet grid cells but by large, persistent storm systems that dump rain over wide areas for consecutive days. By identifying events in this three-dimensional way, the researchers captured the kinds of organized, basin-scale rainstorms that have historically caused the Huai River’s most destructive floods.

The projections cover the period from 2021 to 2100 under four Shared Socioeconomic Pathways, the standard scenario framework used in the most recent Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change assessments. These pathways span futures ranging from relatively sustainable development with low greenhouse gas emissions to a fragmented world with high emissions and slower economic growth. Against a baseline period of 1995 to 2014, the results show that basin-wide annual frequency of extreme precipitation events increases under every scenario. By the late century, from 2081 to 2100, event frequency climbs by roughly 44 percent to 99 percent depending on the pathway, a near doubling of the storm frequency that the basin’s 180 million residents and vast farmland would have to contend with.

The spatial fingerprint of this change is also revealing. In the baseline era, increases in event frequency are concentrated in the northern and eastern portions of the basin. As the century progresses, however, the areas experiencing more frequent extreme rainfall expand outward into the central and southern parts of the basin. The Huai River Basin occupies a climatic transition zone between China’s humid south and semi-arid north, and it has long been a battleground between cold northern air masses and warm, moisture-laden monsoon flow from the south. The projected expansion of extreme-rainfall territory into the basin’s core suggests that this transition zone is becoming an increasingly active arena for severe rainstorms, with consequences for regions and infrastructure that have not historically faced the most intense flood threats.

Translating hazard into risk requires overlaying it with what scientists call exposure: the people and economic assets located where hazards strike. The researchers drew on gridded population and gross domestic product datasets developed under the shared socioeconomic pathways to project exposure to the year 2100. In the baseline period, about 71.5 million people in the basin were exposed to extreme precipitation events. By 2081 to 2100, that figure rises to between 81.4 million and 160.2 million depending on the scenario, an increase of roughly 14 percent to 124 percent. The upper end of that range, associated with the higher-emission SSP3-7.0 pathway, implies that more than a doubling of population exposure is possible if both emissions and population pressures remain high.

The economic numbers are even more dramatic. Baseline GDP exposure to extreme precipitation in the basin stands at approximately 0.48 trillion constant 2010 US dollars. Late-century projections place it between 7.40 and 19.65 trillion dollars, a more than fifteenfold to fortyfold increase over the baseline. Even accounting for inflation adjustments and the general growth of the Chinese economy embedded in the scenarios, the scale of wealth potentially in the path of extreme rainfall is transformative. It underscores a pattern increasingly recognized in the climate-risk literature: as economies grow and concentrate, the same physical hazard can inflict vastly larger losses, making economic exposure a fast-moving target for adaptation planners.

Crucially, the study goes beyond projecting totals to ask which forces drive the changes. By decomposing exposure changes into climate, socioeconomic, and interaction effects, the researchers found a striking asymmetry between people and money. For population exposure, the climate effect, meaning the increased frequency and extent of extreme precipitation events, is the dominant contributor under all four scenarios, although population growth adds a positive contribution under SSP3-7.0. In other words, where and how often it rains hardest matters most for how many people are affected. For GDP exposure, the picture inverts: socioeconomic development and its interaction with climate together account for 92.8 percent to 95.5 percent of the projected increase, while the direct climate effect plays a comparatively small role. The economic toll of future floods, in short, is chiefly a story about where wealth accumulates, not merely about how the storms change.

One further finding carries particular weight for urban planners. Events that overlap with urban areas account for 55.2 percent to 57.5 percent of all basin-wide extreme precipitation events during 2021 to 2100, and these urban-intersecting storms become more frequent toward the late century. This is significant because cities concentrate both people and impervious surfaces; when intense rain falls on asphalt and concrete rather than absorbent soil, runoff surges quickly into streets and drainage systems, producing flash flooding even from storms of moderate duration. Previous research has shown that urbanization modifies local rainfall patterns and that expanding impervious cover amplifies urban flood responses to climate variability. The Huai River Basin contains some of China’s most rapidly urbanizing provinces, and the study’s results suggest that the coincidence of urban growth and intensifying storms will be a defining flood-risk challenge for the region.

The authors, who also include Fushuang Jiang of Anhui Normal University, Jianqing Zhai of the National Climate Center of the China Meteorological Administration, and Ziyan Chen of the Anhui Climate Center, emphasize that their results clarify how extreme precipitation frequency and socioeconomic exposure are expected to change in the basin and provide actionable information for flood-risk reduction. The Huai River has a long and painful flood history; the basin has been engineered for centuries with levees, channels, and detention areas, yet disasters continue to test those defenses. This study adds a forward-looking dimension to that engineering tradition, identifying not only that risk will grow but where it will grow and which levers, emissions trajectories, population policy, and especially the spatial planning of economic development, will determine its ultimate size. With late-century GDP exposure potentially two orders of magnitude above baseline, the message for the Huai River Basin is unambiguous: the coming decades will demand flood defenses and land-use planning commensurate with a hazard landscape that is expanding in frequency, in territory, and in the value of what lies in harm’s way.

Subject of Research: Projected changes in population and economic exposure to extreme precipitation events in the Huai River Basin under CMIP6 climate and shared socioeconomic pathway scenarios

Article Title: Future changes and drivers of socioeconomic exposure to extreme precipitation in the Huai River Basin

Article References: Future changes and drivers of socioeconomic exposure to extreme precipitation in the Huai River Basin. (n.d.). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11069-026-08417-x

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1007/s11069-026-08417-x

Keywords: extreme precipitation, socioeconomic exposure, Huai River Basin, CMIP6, shared socioeconomic pathways, flood risk, population exposure, GDP exposure, climate change, urban flooding, climate projections, disaster risk

The study draws on qualitative field data analysed through a critical-realist and political-economy lens, a methodological combination that allows the researchers to look beyond visible hazards and interrogate the hidden structures that produce them. Rather than treating landslides or dried springs as isolated technical failures, the authors trace them to entrenched mechanisms: political patronage networks that award contracts to allies, weak governance that fails to enforce safety codes, and a dominant narrative that equates infrastructure with development regardless of how it is built. These structures, the paper argues, are not background conditions but active causal engines behind Nepal’s growing disaster toll.

The empirical texture of the research is striking. The authors document bulldozer-led road construction that slices through unstable slopes without adequate drainage or retaining structures, a practice so aggressive that local communities have coined the term ‘dozer terrorism’ to describe it. They describe the annual fiscal-year budget rush, in which local governments scramble to spend allocated funds before the financial year closes, leading to projects approved and executed in weeks with minimal environmental assessment. Tunnel blasting for hydropower schemes has destabilised hillsides and drained the springs that mountain villages depend on for drinking water and irrigation. Unregulated extraction of sand, gravel, and stone from riverbeds and slopes further weakens the terrain, while unsafe settlement expansion pushes homes onto land that engineers would classify as hazardous.

The consequences are already visible across the landscape. The study records slope instability along newly cut road corridors, the drying of natural springs, displacement of communities, and biodiversity loss in fragile mid-hill environments. Crucially, the authors emphasise that these impacts do not remain confined to individual project sites. Disaster risk, they show, extends across roads, rivers, settlements, and entire infrastructure corridors, linking one community’s hazard to another’s downstream vulnerability. A road cut high on a ridge can deliver sediment and debris to villages far below; a tunnel that drains an aquifer can force families to abandon land their grandparents farmed for generations.

What makes the study analytically distinctive is its refusal to treat development as inherently safe or inherently risky. The authors argue that outcomes hinge on how, by whom, and under what conditions development is pursued. The same road, built with proper geological assessment, drainage design, and community consultation, can transform livelihoods; built hastily under patronage pressure, it becomes a scar that sheds landslides for decades. This reframing challenges both the triumphalist infrastructure narrative that dominates national politics and the simplistic view that all development in fragile mountains is destructive. The problem, in other words, is not development itself but the political economy that shapes its execution.

The critical-realist framework the researchers employ deserves attention in its own right. Drawing on the philosophy of Roy Bhaskar and the tradition of realist social science, the study seeks to identify the underlying generative mechanisms—patronage, fiscal incentives, institutional weakness—that produce observable events such as unsafe construction and subsequent slope failure. By blending this ontology with political-economy analysis, the authors offer what they describe as a methodological path for future research on the development-disaster interface, one that moves beyond correlational studies of hazards and toward explanations of why risky practices persist despite their known consequences.

The political-economy dimension of the analysis resonates with a broader international literature on disasters and corruption. Previous research has shown that corrupt practices in the construction industry, from substandard materials to rigged procurement, measurably increase disaster losses, and that the political economy of ‘natural’ disasters often determines who suffers and who profits. The Nepal study extends this line of inquiry into a mountain setting where the physical fragility of the terrain amplifies every governance failure. It also connects to earlier work by Nepali and international scholars documenting how road building in the Himalaya has repeatedly increased landslide activity, and how haphazard urbanisation in the Kathmandu Valley has followed a similar logic of risk creation.

The timing of the study is significant. Nepal’s post-2015 federal restructuring devolved substantial planning and budget authority to local governments, unleashing an unprecedented wave of rural infrastructure construction. While this decentralisation has delivered roads and electricity to communities long neglected by the centre, the new study suggests it has also multiplied the sites at which risk is being manufactured, often by local institutions that lack the technical capacity, environmental safeguards, or accountability mechanisms to build safely. The authors warn that disaster risk is likely to expand further as development penetrates ever more fragile landscapes and creates new exposure in places that previously had little built infrastructure at all.

The paper’s central prescription is correspondingly radical. Building mountain safety, the authors argue, demands more than coping capacity, early warning systems, or hazard management. It requires rethinking the very development processes that produce risk in the first place. Without a shift toward transparent, accountable, and risk-informed planning, Nepal’s present rural development model will, in the authors’ words, continue to normalise risk, reproduce disasters, and deepen vulnerabilities in the name of development. That means enforcing environmental impact assessment, curbing the fiscal-year spending rush, subjecting contract allocation to genuine public scrutiny, and treating geological and hydrological evidence as binding constraints rather than inconvenient formalities.

For the wider disaster research community, the study is a pointed reminder that the line between development and disaster is thinner than policy frameworks usually acknowledge. Every bulldozed slope, every blasted tunnel, and every budget-deadline project embeds decisions about risk into the physical landscape, decisions that will surface years later as landslides, floods, and displacement. The Nepal Himalaya, where some of the world’s most energetic tectonics meet some of the world’s most ambitious rural infrastructure ambitions, offers perhaps the sharpest available illustration of this development-disaster interface. Whether the region’s roads and dams become instruments of resilience or engines of catastrophe will depend not on the mountains, but on the politics that shape how they are built.

Subject of Research: Political economy of development-induced disaster risk creation in the Nepal Himalaya

Article Title: Development-disaster interface: Political economy of development-induced risk creation in the Nepal Himalaya

Article References: Development-disaster interface: Political economy of development-induced risk creation in the Nepal Himalaya. (n.d.). https://doi.org/10.1007/s13412-026-01139-3

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1007/s13412-026-01139-3

Keywords: Nepal, Himalaya, disaster risk, development, political economy, road construction, hydropower, landslides, critical realism, vulnerability, infrastructure governance, haphazard planning

The urgency of the work is grounded in real events. At Xocén, the roof of an underground cavern gave way suddenly in the middle of a Maya community, toppling a two-century-old Ceiba tree and opening a sinkhole roughly 57 meters in diameter and up to 36 meters deep. The researchers believe intense rainfall and the passage of heavy construction machinery in the days before the collapse triggered the failure of a cavern ceiling that had been weakening for a long time below the surface. At Saamal, an open cenote popular with visitors, partial collapse of the steep cliff walls suggests that even mature, apparently stable karst features can remain structurally active for years.

The scientific setting is extraordinary. The Yucatán’s cenote density traces back to the Chicxulub impact crater, the roughly 200-kilometer-wide scar left by the asteroid that ended the Cretaceous period. The crater’s fractured rim created a zone of enhanced permeability, the so-called Ring of Cenotes, along which carbonate dissolution concentrated over millions of years. When acidified rainwater percolates through limestone, it enlarges fractures and voids until the remaining roof can no longer support its own weight. Because karst terrains show few visible warning signs at the surface until failure occurs, they account for a disproportionate share of sudden ground-collapse hazards worldwide.

Conventional geotechnical investigation relies on drilling and excavation, methods that are expensive, slow, and impractical to deploy across many sites immediately after a collapse. ERT offers an alternative. By injecting electrical current into the ground through arrays of electrodes and measuring the resulting voltage differences, the technique produces cross-sectional images of subsurface resistivity. Competent dry limestone appears highly resistive, while water-saturated, clay-rich, or heavily weathered rock conducts electricity well. Air-filled voids also register as strong resistive anomalies. These contrasts map directly onto the mechanical properties that govern collapse susceptibility.

At Xocén, the team deployed a Syscal Pro system with Wenner and Schlumberger electrode arrays along three profiles totaling up to 110 meters each, reaching effective investigation depths of roughly 16 to 25 meters. After filtering unreliable readings and inverting the data with a smoothness-constrained least-squares algorithm, the final models achieved root-mean-square misfits between about 2 and 2.5 percent. The inverted sections revealed a consistent vertical stratification: a resistive cap of dry limestone more than 1000 ohm-meters, an intermediate transition zone of partially weathered rock, and a laterally continuous conductive interval below 250 ohm-meters interpreted as water-saturated, highly altered limestone, whose top approximates the local water table.

Most striking was a vertically persistent conductive anomaly in one profile, where resistivity dropped below 150 ohm-meters, linking the surface to the deep conductive layer. The researchers interpret this feature as a fracture-controlled infiltration corridor, a preferential pathway through which water percolates, accelerating dissolution and progressively weakening the rock mass. This geometry suggests that the Xocén collapse was not an isolated surface event but the geomorphological expression of a pre-existing weakened subsurface domain, with future instability most likely concentrated at the interfaces between the resistive cap, the transition zone, and the deeper conductive material.

At Saamal, five closely spaced profiles were acquired along the vulnerable cliff rim using a SuperSting R8 system, with electrodes just one meter apart to resolve the approximately 3-meter-thick limestone ledge involved in the recent failures. A robust, blocky inversion captured the sharp contrasts near the wall. The sections showed a thin weathered conductive veneer half a meter to a meter thick overlying competent carbonate rock, plus a very high-resistivity domain exceeding 1600 ohm-meters adjacent to the cliff, interpreted conservatively as a dry, possibly fractured carbonate block. Because air-filled cavities and dry rock yield similarly high resistivities, the authors caution that resistivity magnitude alone cannot confirm open voids. To visualize domain continuity between profiles, the team trained a neural network to interpolate the independently inverted two-dimensional sections into a three-dimensional resistivity volume, a supporting tool rather than a true 3D inversion.

A depth-of-investigation analysis following the established Oldenburg and Li method confirmed that the models are constrained by real data to mean depths of about 19.7 meters at Xocén and 2.9 meters at Saamal, guarding against over-interpretation of poorly resolved regions. The authors are candid about limitations: no borehole, geotechnical, or piezometric control was available, so the inferred domains remain hydrogeophysical rather than directly verified, and the resistivity thresholds are site-specific rather than universal. They recommend corroboration through fracture mapping, ground-penetrating radar, shallow seismic surveys, and repeat ERT monitoring after rainfall events.

The broader significance lies in translating geophysical images into operational disaster-risk decisions. The study proposes that collapse-prone sectors be identified not by a single universal signature but by site-specific combinations of shallow weathered conductive veneers, laterally connected saturated zones, fracture-controlled infiltration pathways, and sharp resistivity interfaces. Classifying ground into high, intermediate, and low susceptibility zones gives authorities a defensible basis for restricting access, prioritizing monitoring, and planning land use around cenotes in populated or heavily visited areas. As reported collapses of cenote roofs increase across the Yucatán, this rapid, affordable screening framework offers communities and tourism operators a practical first line of defense against one of nature’s most sudden geological traps.

Subject of Research: Electrical resistivity tomography screening of collapse susceptibility in karst cenote environments of the Yucatán Peninsula, Mexico

Article Title: Electrical Resistivity Tomography for collapse susceptibility screening in karst cenote environments: A case study in the Yucatán Peninsula, Mexico

Article References: Juárez, S. L., Coyoacán, Aleman, J. C. O., Castañeda, C. C., Hernandez, J. F. E., Perez, D. A. P., & Martinez, J. M. (2026). Electrical Resistivity Tomography for collapse susceptibility screening in karst cenote environments: A case study in the Yucatán Peninsula, Mexico. Environmental Challenges, Article 101642. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.envc.2026.101642

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: Not provided

Keywords: cenotes, karst, electrical resistivity tomography, Yucatán Peninsula, sinkhole collapse, Chicxulub crater, geophysics, Xocén, Saamal, disaster risk, limestone dissolution, Ring of Cenotes