Abstract Natural hazards such as floods, landslides, earthquakes, and storm surges pose interconnected and compounding risks to urban areas, particularly in hazard-prone regions such as Ormoc City, Philippines. With intensifying climate variability and rapid urbanization, integrated and locally grounded risk assessments are increasingly essential. This study developed a localized multi-hazard susceptibility map by integrating the Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP) and Geographic Information Systems (GIS) within a multi-criteria evaluation framework. Individual susceptibility maps for flooding, landslides, earthquakes, and storm surges were generated using spatial variables including elevation, slope, land use, drainage proximity, distance to fault lines, and coastal exposure. AHP was applied through structured pairwise comparisons, with subject-matter experts serving as primary decision-makers. The weighting process explicitly incorporated local knowledge, historical hazard experience, and contextual understanding of Ormoc City’s socio-environmental conditions. Both criterion-level and hazard-level weights were derived through AHP, allowing the multi-hazard map to reflect the relative importance of each hazard rather than assuming equal influence. The weighted layers were integrated in GIS using a Weighted Linear Combination (WLC) approach to produce a composite susceptibility map. The results indicate that 34.51% of the city falls under low susceptibility, 64.18% under moderate susceptibility, and 1.31% under high susceptibility. High-risk zones correspond to areas where multiple hazards spatially converge, particularly in coastal and low-lying barangays. The study demonstrates that coupling AHP-derived weighting with expert-driven local knowledge enables context-sensitive and policy-relevant hazard mapping, strengthening land-use planning, disaster preparedness, and resilient urban development.
Morales et al. (Mon,) studied this question.