October 13 is the International Day for Disaster Risk Reduction. PLOS ONE publishes research on all aspects of disaster risk reduction and across the spectrum of natural disasters, such as flooding, earthquakes, wildfires, landslides, heat waves and more. Today, we would like to highlight some recent studies published in PLOS ONE, and the authors behind this important work. We check in with Paula Andrea Valencia Londoño, who is the first author on a recent study of an informal settlement in northwestern Colombia, and Danielle Buttke, first author of a paper looking at how heat waves affect visitors to the Grand Canyon National Park.