Helped organise RisCon26 at Karlstad University and hosted the opening keynote by UN SRSG Kamal Kishore

Created on October 10, 2026

2026   ·   kau-phd   ·   conference   organising   sesac

With UN SRSG Kamal Kishore at RisCon26, the Societal Risk Conference 2026, Karlstad University

In October, Karlstad University hosted RisCon26, the Societal Risk Conference 2026, organised by the Centre for Societal Risk Research (CSR). I was part of the organising committee, and this one was close to my heart: I had been working on it behind the scenes for almost nine months.

Behind the scenes

I built and ran the conference website, helped manage the abstracts, and handled much of the technical support in the background, before and during the conference.

Hosting the opening day

On the first day I hosted the main sessions:

  • Keynote by Kamal Kishore, Special Representative of the UN Secretary-General for Disaster Risk Reduction and Head of UNDRR: Cascading risks, emerging threats, and interdependencies.
  • Panel discussion: Societal risk in an interconnected world: reflections on cascading risks, emerging threats, and societal interdependencies.
  • Plenary: The economics of disaster risk reduction, moderated by Margareta Wahlström, on how governments, financial institutions, insurers, the private sector and researchers can strengthen the financing of disaster risk reduction, with a focus on new financing instruments, evidence gaps and Swedish experience.

Over the two days I also hosted several of the parallel oral sessions. Meeting SRSG Kamal Kishore in person was a highlight of the week.

A fully booked SESAC workshop on floods and accessibility

On 8 October, SESAC ran Workshop E: Critical Infrastructures and Accessibility Analysis under Flood Conditions as part of the conference. Stefanos Georganos and I facilitated it, and Amalia Chantziara led the session. Registrations exceeded the 30 available places.

The workshop was an entry-level, hands-on introduction to Earth observation, GIS and spatial analysis, built around one question: how does flooding change accessibility, and who is most affected? In a guided Google Colab exercise based on a realistic Swedish flood scenario, participants combined flood hazard data, OpenStreetMap road networks, critical infrastructure locations and population data. The analysis showed how flooding can cut off access to hospitals and emergency services, even in areas that are not flooded themselves.

The feedback was encouraging. Of the participants who answered the evaluation, 80% found the level of difficulty right and 70% named accessibility analysis as one of the most useful parts. People especially valued working with real geospatial data, and asked for more hands-on time and more explanation of the code next time. The discussions also opened up ideas for future collaboration between SESAC and CSR’s RiskLab.

Two co-authored presentations

Analyzing hydrological and land cover changes driving water scarcity in indigenous communities in Southern Bahia, Brazil, presented by Claudia Canedo Rosso, with Suanne Segovia-Tzompa, Marcia Fernanda de Camargo and me. The study combines Landsat and Sentinel imagery with participatory mapping, workshops and interviews in indigenous communities. It shows how infrastructure growth, tourism, rising water demand, deforestation and expanding eucalyptus monoculture have reduced the quality and quantity of local water, and how linking satellite analysis with local knowledge can support community-led monitoring and more inclusive water management.

Event-based windstorm exposure in Sweden using hazard and building footprints, presented by Eleni Georgali, with Stefanos Georganos, Konstantinos Karagiorgos and me. We used SMHI gust observations, MESAN (AROME) analysis data, Copernicus Earth observation predictors and Lantmäteriet data with XGBoost and neural networks to model footprints for 135 extreme windstorms between 2000 and 2024. Overlaying them with building data shows exposure concentrated in central and southern Sweden, and that storms with similar peak gusts can differ greatly in extent and severity, which is why event-based footprints matter for emergency planning.

Thank you to CSR and the whole RisCon26 organising team. Nine months of work came together over two very full days, and I learned a lot from being part of it.

Sai Ganesh Veeravalli