This symposium aims to bring together the complementary expertise of world leading groups carrying out research on the engineering assessment, prevention and mitigation of geohazards. To mitigate these disasters it is necessary to improve our understanding of the failures taking place in flood defence embankments, to have better models for a more rational risk assessment of areas prone to flooding, to investigate the geomechanical conditions leading to the onset of landslides more in depth, to model debris flows and mudflows to estimate runout distances and destructive power of the landslide materials, etc. In other words, prevention, preparedness and mitigation of geohazards rely on sound geo-engineering which requires competences in geomechanics, numerical modelling, constitutive models for soils, hazard zonation and risk assessment.