When an impact layer was generated in GeoSAFE (after the upgrade to InaSAFE 4) and published back to GeoNode, it caused the server to crash (https://github.com/kartoza/geosafe/issues/345)
This was fixed with https://github.com/kartoza/otf-project/pull/13.
When a new layer is published in GeoNode with QGIS server backend, a new QGIS project is created on the fly to house that layer. This fix ensured that process configured the QGIS project correctly.