Dynamics of Disasters (DOD) Hybrid Threats Workshop (co-located with AGIT 2026)

Disasters occur when hazards - both natural as well as man-made - and their corresponding risks can no longer be properly contained, leading to serious detrimental consequences in terms of loss of life, financial repercussions or devastation to infrastructure and the environment. In recent years, the rising number of disasters occurring all over the world, even affecting or threatening regions where in the past certain hazards were not so prominent, have painfully revealed that disaster preparedness as well as disaster management are not always up to par to the challenges posed by various kinds of disasters. The COVID-19 pandemic has been an especially hard test by reality for many aspects of disaster preparedness as well as operational disaster management policies, and it still impacts our lives today and will continue to do so for some time in the future. From the perspective of today, the world-wide spread and the multitude of resulting different (local and global) implications during the COVID-19 pandemic highlight the importance to consider the dynamic evolvement of a disaster, which is precisely what the DOD-series has been focused on in the past and will also be focused on in its edition in 2026.

The increasing interconnectedness between the physical and digital domains, as well as their interdependencies, further add to the challenges pertaining to disaster risk reduction and disaster management. Combined with an increasingly complex geopolitical landscape, these developments have recently brought forth hybrid threats as one of the most pressing contemporary security challenges. Such new and emerging threats reach farther than cyber-physical systems, which – so far – have been the prime examples for targets of novel attacks and their consequences, which can arise from both the cyber- as well as the physical domain. The impact of hybrid threats on our modern societies is profound and only increases the challenges pertaining to disaster risk, disaster management organizations and first responders.

At DOD-HT 2026 will therefore continue to pay interest to the topic of hybrid threats, with particular attention given to new and emerging threats due to the ever-growing integration as well as increasing coupling between the cyber- and physical domain.

This iteration of DOD-HT is dealing with all aspects related to the dynamics of disasters, and encouraged invitation-only topics dealing with hybrid threats to be presented at DOD-HT 2026. We would also like to highlight that special focus was given on addressing challenges relating to the interdisciplinary character of disaster response and disaster management.

We will organize a call for extended versions of papers presented at DOD-HT 2026 to be included in dedicated post-proceedings of DOD-HT 2026 published by Springer, similar to previous editions of the DOD-series, open to all participants of the workshop:

• for DOD 2015: https://www.springer.com/us/book/9783319437071
• for DOD 2017: https://www.springer.com/us/book/9783319974415
• for DOD 2019: https://www.springer.com/gp/book/9783030649722
• for DOD 2021: Operations Research Forum virtual issue.
• For DOD 2024: https://link.springer.com/book/10.1007/978-3-032-08606-8

We are also grateful and honored to announce that this year’s plenary talk is given by Distinguished Professor Panos Pardalos (Steering Committee Chair of DOD, University of Florida).

We are very much looking forward to hosting DOD-HT 2026 on July 7, 2026, which will be co-located with this year’s iteration of AGIT, the International Conference for Geoinformatics (AGIT 2026 ) and welcoming you to the beautiful city of Salzburg!