Geo- and Environmental Hazard Studies in Kuwait

Abstract

AbstractLow magnitude Earthquakes are the most natural hazard facing Kuwait, while other environmental challenges such as flooding, dust fallout, land degradation, and aeolian sand movement often arise from human impact as well as natural factors. Because of the rapid socio-economic development in the last five decades in Kuwait, these issues cause environmental and social problems as well as economic disturbance; they are also considered natural disasters for country. The scale and intensity of the geological environment hazards are considerably increasing especially land degradation, and impacting on the harsh structure of desert ecosystem. Due to fragility of the desert environment, human activities exceeding the carrying capability of the geo-environment system can easily lead to geological and environmental hazards; such as runoff, sand and dunes movements and dust fallout causing serial environmental and health impacts. Geographic Information System (GIS) has been used to evaluate the degrees of geological hazard and risk by producing maps for each hazard; seismic, sand potentiality, hydrologic risk, land degradation, and sand drift severity maps are produced.