Category: Research updates
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Masters project completed, adding a case study of the 2023 Riederhorn wildfire to the FiRES portfolio
(Photos are from the photo-book “Brand am Riederhorn” (2023), reproduced with the kind permission of the Bitsch and Riederhorn Municipalities.) For the past year, Lena Widmer has focused her Masters project on the 2023 Riederhorn wildfire in Canton Valais, Switzerland. Commonly referred to in the press as the Bitsch wildfire, the Riederhorn more accurately refers…
Christine Eriksen
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It’s full steam ahead with a new institutional home for the FiRES project!
As of October 1, 2025, the FiRES project has a new institutional home at ETH Zürich. I am excited to be back in the Department of Humanities, Social and Political Sciences, which is hosting the FiRES project after its initial two years at the University of Bern. FiRES’ fieldwork and collaborations continue unabated. The team…
Christine Eriksen
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Project stock-take: a busy six months!
It’s that time of year when I’m asked by the Institute of Geography at the University of Bern to contribute to the Annual Report. It made me realise that a project stock-take is well and truly overdue, as the Geographies of Disasters team has been very busy the last six months. An absolute highlight has…
Christine Eriksen
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Nurturing networks, sharing insights
It has been a busy few weeks nurturing connections and building collaborations through three key events and a wonderful network of wildfire researchers and practitioners in Europe. In May, I was invited by the Swiss Federal Office for the Environment (FOEN/BAFU) to contribute to their first ever “Waldbrand Tagung” (wildfire workshop) on 22 May in…
Christine Eriksen
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Nurturing collaborations!
Since 2014, Gregory Simon and I have nurtured an on-going research collaboration that has enabled us to think and write together about the diverse ways affluence and vulnerability intersect in the context of disasters. Many have inspired and worked with us along the way, and to continue to grow this collaborative endeavour, the Geographies of…
Christine Eriksen
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Tally-up! Our four-year project on insurance and disasters concludes!
When disaster strikes, house and contents insurance is often positioned as a safety net of modern Australian life. Yet many households are under-insured or not insured at all. In 2017, Kate Booth (UTAS), Bruce Tranter (UTAS), Shaun French (UoN), and I were awarded an Australian Research Council Discovery Project (DP170100096) to examine the social and…
Christine Eriksen
Dr. Christine Eriksen 