The Hub will reduce disaster risk for the poor in tomorrow's cities. The failure to integrate disaster risk resilience into urban planning and decision-making is a persistent intractable challenge that condemns hundreds of millions of the World's poor to continued cyclical destruction of their lives and livelihoods. It presents a major barrier to the delivery of the Sustainable Development Goals in expanding urban systems. Science and technology can help, but only against complex multi-hazard context of urban life and the social and cultural background to decision-making in developing countries. Science-informed urbanisation, co-produced and properly integrated with decision support for city authorities, offers the possibility of risk-sensitive development for millions of the global poor. This is a major opportunity - some 60% of the area expected to be urban by 2030 is yet to be built. Our aim is to catalyse a transition from crisis management to risk-informed planning in four partner cities and globally through collaborating International governance organisations. The Hub, co-designed with local and international stakeholders from the start, will deliver this agenda through integrated research across four urban systems - Istanbul, Kathmandu, Nairobi and Quito - chosen for their multi-hazard exposure, and variety of urban form, development status and governance. Trusted core partnerships from previous Global Challenge Research Fund, Newton Fund and UK Research Council projects provide solid foundations on which city based research projects have been built around identified, existing, policy interventions to provide research solutions to specific current development problems. We have developed innovative, strategic research and impact funds and capable management processes constantly to monitor progress and to reinforce successful research directions and impact pathways. In each urban system, the Hub will reduce risk for 1-4 million people by (1) Co-producing forensic examinations of risk root causes, drivers of vulnerability and trend analysis of decision-making culture for key, historic multi-hazard events. (2) Combining quantitative, multi-hazard intensity, exposure and vulnerability analysis using advances in earth observation, citizen science, low cost sensors and high-resolution surveys with institutional and power analysis to allow multi-hazard risk assessment to interface with urban planning culture and engineering. (3) Convene diverse stakeholder groups-communities, schools, municipalities private enterprise, national agencies- around new understanding of multi-hazard urban disaster risk stimulating engagement and innovation in making risk-sensitive development choices to help meet the SDGs and Sendai Framework. Impact will occur both within and beyond the life of the Hub and will raise the visibility of cities in global risk analysis and policy making. City Partnerships, integrating city authorities, researchers, community leaders and the private sector, will develop and own initiatives including high-resolution validated models of multi-hazard risk to reflect individual experience and inform urban development planning, tools and methods for monitoring, evaluation and audit of disaster risk, and recommendations for planning policy to mitigate risks in future development. City partnerships will collaborate with national and regional city networks, policy champions and UN agencies using research outputs to structure city and community plans responding to the Sendai Framework and targeted SDG indicators, and build methods and capacity for reporting and wider critique of the SDG and Sendai reporting process. Legacy will be enabled through the ownership of risk assessment and resilience building tools by city and international partners who will identify need, own, modify and deploy tools beyond the life of the Hub.

A global trend of glacier loss is leading to the development of high-mountain glacial lakes that can exceed kilometres in length and over 200 m in depth, therefore storing vast quantities of water. However, their poorly constrained estimates of current and future water stores restricts assessments of water resource availability and potential downstream flood risks. Glacial lakes can drain seasonally and catastrophically, leading to downstream flooding with high socio-economic impacts, particularly across High-Mountain Asia in countries such as Nepal. These flood events cause widespread concern, spanning mountain communities to development agencies and government departments. However, historical records suggest that most glacial lakes are inherently stable. To ensure that disaster risk-reduction resources are targeted to deliver maximum benefit, and that water resource trends are understood, it is therefore essential to develop a robust evidence base in the context of climate change, accelerating lake development, and urban expansion into mountain regions. High-mountain glacial lake water storage is measured for a small proportion of lakes globally due to logistically challenging survey requirements and the inability to derive depth observations using satellite data. Instead, glacial lake bathymetry datasets are produced through field surveys, and are subsequently used to inform empirical scaling relationships that relate lake area to volume. Estimating water storage using these relationships that are based on few datapoints globally (n~100) contains large uncertainties (>20-50%). Glacial lakes also promote a positive feedback, whereby the thermal energy stored in lake water and buoyancy forces acting on the glacier can accelerate glacier recession. However, similarly sparse observations of lake-glacier interactions mean these mechanisms are not parameterised in models predicting glacier evolution and downstream runoff trends. This Fellowship presents an integrated, interdisciplinary approach to assess both glacial lake development and downstream floods in topographically complex catchments. I will develop an innovative survey methodology to derive the bathymetry of glacial lakes using both a single beam sonar, combined with a cutting edge multibeam sonar system. The latter will produce complete maps of lakebed morphology and reveal the subaqueous glacier structure. Extensive bathymetry surveys in Nepal will underpin numerical modelling and machine learning approaches that conceptualise glacial lake geometry and development trajectories, and quantify current and future water resource trends. The models derived from these data will also provide a scalable solution to robustly estimate dynamic water storage at unsurveyed lakes, therefore reducing the requirement for costly and difficult field surveys. I will also address the critical requirement for high-resolution topographic data to enable robust flood modelling downstream of glacial lakes. These models will identify socio-economic exposure of buildings and infrastructure to flood events caused by precipitation extremes or glacial lake drainage events. The Fellowship's outputs will be operationalised in an online open access Glacial Lake Observatory (GLO) platform that will underpin a new era of collaborative glacial lake research by removing barriers to data access and knowledge exchange. The GLO will catalogue glacial lakes globally and will monitor near-real-time lake dynamics using optical, radar, and altimetry satellite data. Our research culture will advocate for ethical and inclusive overseas fieldwork practices that strengthen partnerships, research collaborations, and knowledge exchange, therefore maximising the long-term benefits of the Fellowship's outputs. Collaboration with leading academics, development agencies, and government departments in Nepal will enable co-production of knowledge that addresses global water resource challenges.