Dear Colleagues,

During the 56th Rankine Lecture “Geotechnics, energy and climate change” by Prof. Jardine, it was stated how geotechnical engineering has matured sufficiently to contribute to resolving some of society’s grand challenges. Climate change represents one of these substantial challenges, recognized worldwide, that is having the greatest impact on our way of life and well-being.

In this view, geotechnical engineering can play a key role in terms of the adaptation of earth structures and slopes to climate changes. Specifically, there is an increasing need to quantify the impacts of more severe and frequent extreme events on the short- and long-term behaviour of earth structures and response of natural/engineered slopes. However, despite there being several large-scale studies devoted to investigating various aspects of climate change, a clear gap in the state of knowledge still exists with reference to the analysis of the resilience of geotechnical structures, and natural and engineered slopes to changes in climatic trends. Many of these climatic trends pose multi-physics problems, involving thermo-hydro-mechanical processes in soils and earth structures.

To support predictions and projections, last-generation datasets with high spatio-temporal resolution—like those from the Copernicus Services’ Portals—are useful to feed models, big data analytics enabling timely, robust, and efficient decisions.

This Special Issue enables researchers to broadly contribute to these topics by exploring how soil–atmosphere interactions and extreme event patterns in a changing climate can affect the performance of geotechnical structures and natural/engineered slopes, with a key perspective on the role of geotechnical engineering in climate adaptation.

It is recommended that authors approach, at an early stage, the Guest Editors about possible submissions to verify the appropriateness of their potential contributions. If appropriate, an abstract will be requested, and the corresponding author will be required to submit their full manuscript online by the deadline of 15 October 2021.

Dr. Alfredo Reder
Dr. Guido Rianna
Dr. Mary Antonette Beroya-Eitner
Guest Editors

Manuscript Submission Information

Manuscripts should be submitted online at www.mdpi.com by registering and logging in to this website. Once you are registered, click here to go to the submission form. Manuscripts can be submitted until the deadline. All submissions that pass pre-check are peer-reviewed. Accepted papers will be published continuously in the journal (as soon as accepted) and will be listed together on the special issue website. Research articles, review articles as well as short communications are invited. For planned papers, a title and short abstract (about 100 words) can be sent to the Editorial Office for announcement on this website.

Submitted manuscripts should not have been published previously, nor be under consideration for publication elsewhere (except conference proceedings papers). All manuscripts are thoroughly refereed through a single-blind peer-review process. A guide for authors and other relevant information for submission of manuscripts is available on the Instructions for Authors page. Geosciences is an international peer-reviewed open access monthly journal published by MDPI.

Please visit the Instructions for Authors page before submitting a manuscript. The Article Processing Charge (APC) for publication in this open access journal is 1800 CHF (Swiss Francs). Submitted papers should be well formatted and use good English. Authors may use MDPI's English editing service prior to publication or during author revisions.

• Climate change
• Geotechnical engineering
• Earth structure
• Natural and engineered slopes
• Extreme events