New China-led M-CHAIN initiative focuses on early warning, risk governance for mountain hazards

M-CHAIN, a China-led international mega-science initiative focused on intelligent early warning and risk governance for cascading mountain hazards, was launched on Sunday at Chengdu University of Technology in Sichuan province.

More than 100 experts and scholars from over 10 countries and regions, including Nepal, Pakistan, the United Kingdom, Canada, and Turkiye, attended the launch ceremony.

Professor Fan Xuanmei, director of the university's State Key Laboratory of Geohazard Prevention and Geoenvironment Protection and chairman of the initiative, said climate change is intensifying cross-border and cross-basin compound disaster risks in mountain regions around the world.

"Hazards in high mountain areas are often not isolated events, but a continuous process in which ice-rock avalanches, debris flows, river blockages, and outburst floods interact and cascade," she said. "M-CHAIN aims to pool global expertise to deepen understanding of cross-border mountain hazard chains, advance smart monitoring and early warnings, and strengthen disaster prevention capacity."

Scheduled to run from 2026 to 2034, the initiative will establish a global database of mountain hazard chains and conduct intelligent early-warning pilot projects in representative mountain ranges, including the Qinghai-Xizang Plateau, the Alps, and the Andes, Fan said. It will also train early-career researchers from regions such as Africa, South Asia, and Southeast Asia through the iRALL School, an international training program specializing in large landslides and mountain hazards.

M-CHAIN is led by the State Key Laboratory of Geohazard Prevention and Geoenvironment Protection at Chengdu University of Technology. It was endorsed as a program under the United Nations' International Decade of Sciences for Sustainable Development (2024-2033) in July, becoming the first international mega-science initiative led by China in the geohazard field to do so, according to the university. It will be jointly advanced by research institutions from multiple countries, including Italy, Nepal, the United Kingdom, the Netherlands, New Zealand, Switzerland, Canada, and Peru.