LAUSR

The last decade has seen a dramatic increase in damages associated with natural hazards, with the two costliest years ever, 2011 and 2017, resulting in US$330 bn and US$360 bn overall losses (Löw 2018). Despite recent improvements in protection measures (e.g. flood defences, earthquake-resistant buildings) and technology (e.g. forecasting services), the cumulative impacts of natural hazards persist in detrimentally affecting the lives (50,000 people still die on average annually) and livelihoods of millions of people every year (Ritchie and Roser 2018). In this context, extreme value analysis provides a powerful statistical framework to analyse, understand and predict natural hazard events (Coles 2001). The biennial Advances in Extreme Value Analysis and Application to Natural Hazards (EVAN) international conference series aims to: (1) bring together and promote interchange between the diverse community of research scientists, students, practitioners and stakeholders concerned with the complex and inter-disciplinary topic of natural hazard events; (2) encourage the transfer of state-of-the-art and best practice extreme value approaches and tools used by people working in various disciplines; and (3) promote an integrated approach to consider multi-hazard interactions and compounding effects (Zscheischler et al. 2018). The topics covered at the EVAN conferences include: description of probabilistic models that are useful in extreme value problems and applications, non-stationary extreme value analyses, multivariate extreme value statistics, spatial/regional analysis of extreme values, extreme value analysis from a climate perspective, uncertainties in extreme value analyses, risk analysis and adaptation, and resilience and sustainability, across a wide range of geophysical variables (i.e. temperature, rainfall, flows, sea level, winds, surface ocean waves, snow) and natural hazards (i.e. floods, windstorms, wave storms, heat waves, droughts, earthquakes, landslides). The 15 papers in this special issue derive from talks given at the 3rd EVAN conference that took place in Southampton, UK, from 12 to 14 September 2017. The first two contributions to this special issue deal with the challenge of defining extreme events. Mazas (2019) presents an ‘event approach’ that provides a comprehensive