The Foresight Review commissioned in 2012 has a section (co-written by me) on multiple hazard and risk mapping. I forgot to post something about it at the time. Click on the links below for access to the documents.
Reducing Risks of Future Disasters: Priorities for Decision Makers.
Evidence base document for download: State-of-the-Art in Risk Mapping
CASE STUDY: Global Multiple Hazard and Risk mapping (p49)
Authors: Mirianna E.A. Budimir, Peter M. Atkinson and Hugh G. Lewis
A quote from the document for you all:
"Multi-hazard risk assessment should also take into consideration the interaction between multiple hazards affecting an area. Natural hazards act in a natural system and as such are complex and affect each other. The cascading effects of natural hazards and their impact on resultant risk is an important area of research which has received little attention to date."
Sunday 15 September 2013
Thoughts on NERC PURE Associates Brokerage Workshop
On 10th September I attended the NERC PURE Associates brokerage workshop in Oxford, aimed at bringing together researchers and practitioners to collaborate for a grant. The call aims “to fund scientists to work with business, policy-makers and NGOs to apply their knowledge and skills to improve assessments of natural hazard risk and enhance decision-making”, by funding projects of between three to six months’ duration that will transfer existing knowledge, models and expertise into business, policy or NGOs.
NERC stipulated the aim of the projects should be either:
a. To produce robust risk assessments based upon single or multiple natural hazards that integrate measures or models of exposure and vulnerability; this will enable decision-makers to take action to manage risk;
b. To develop tools to support decision-making under environmental uncertainty.
NERC would particularly encourage applications for projects which:
The day was incredibly useful. I made lots of contacts and met people doing really interesting research, with great ideas for projects. Personally, these types of events always get me re-excited about research and reminds me why I am in this field of research. A few things occurred during the day that really surprised or struck me and I thought I would share them on this blog.
After being informed three years ago that multi-hazard risk assessment is already normal practice for catastrophe modelling and risk assessment in the industry (which deflated me a little/lot), I was surprised to discover that is not entirely true. Some Cat Models only account for the major hazards affecting a region and landslide hazards are often entirely missing altogether. Perhaps I was a little naive all those years ago to take the word of one practitioner as gospel. But I had no way of checking. Competitive businesses do not put their information online as open source for all to see. This is entirely natural as they do not want other competitors stealing their methods, but holds back the development of the field of research.
The poor-showing of NGOs at the event surprised me. Although it was emphasised the purpose of the workshop was to get practitioners networking with academics, when the attendee list was skimmed, there were very few of those end users and NGOs - the majority of those there were academics. One of the questions from the research grant call was 'What are the biggest problems facing NGOs?'. With very few there from an NGO, there was noone to answer the question. Perhaps my expectations of the number of NGOs to be there was a little high though. The gap between NGOs and academics is a problem that I keep seeing crop up just in the last few years of my PhD research. There is a realisation that NGOs and end-users need to be involved in research and collaborate or help guide the research questions of academics, but at the end of the day the gap is still pretty big between them. This call was specifically aimed at trying to bridge that gap. I hope that some collaborations come out as a result of the call.
Bridging gaps between disciplines and communicating research is supposed to be encouraged, and yet specialism is rewarded and prized at Universities. This is a huge conflict of priorities. During the workshop, the idea od a 'translator' was raised - someone who understands the science, empathises with the needs of the end-users, and is able to speak both languages and act as a broker. They are essential and valued in communicating the information between scientists and end-users. But in academia they are rarely recognised or respected - publications in academic journals appears to be the end goal. Which on the one hand is right and on the other is frustrating. Perhaps we need a new discipline in academia specifically aimed at this communication, and Geography is the department that this would really work.
Unfortunately, there is still a lack of multi-hazard research. At the workshop, there were only a few proposals talked about that were aimed at this area. And it didn't pop up at all in the discussion sessions. Academics are encouraged to be specialists, and getting round this with inter-disciplinary teams and research projects could help, but often raises more difficulties.
There were a few proposals that were aimed at tackling the multi-hazard issues, and this was encouraging. The field is obviously still new and developing, and it is slowly gathering evidence, models and information behind it. I hope this continues and I look forward to following these developments.
NERC stipulated the aim of the projects should be either:
a. To produce robust risk assessments based upon single or multiple natural hazards that integrate measures or models of exposure and vulnerability; this will enable decision-makers to take action to manage risk;
b. To develop tools to support decision-making under environmental uncertainty.
NERC would particularly encourage applications for projects which:
- develop robust assessments of risk to infrastructure, business operations and supply chains from natural hazards, including extreme weather;
- develop risk models around multi-hazard assessments;
- develop tools to visualise and communicate risk and uncertainty;
- develop tools to inform planning for long-term investment such as infrastructure or business interruption, including risks to the supply chain;
- develop tools to help emergency planning and responses, and build community resilience through humanitarian and development organisations;
- adapt tools developed in other application areas for managing risk and uncertainty to natural hazards.
The day was incredibly useful. I made lots of contacts and met people doing really interesting research, with great ideas for projects. Personally, these types of events always get me re-excited about research and reminds me why I am in this field of research. A few things occurred during the day that really surprised or struck me and I thought I would share them on this blog.
After being informed three years ago that multi-hazard risk assessment is already normal practice for catastrophe modelling and risk assessment in the industry (which deflated me a little/lot), I was surprised to discover that is not entirely true. Some Cat Models only account for the major hazards affecting a region and landslide hazards are often entirely missing altogether. Perhaps I was a little naive all those years ago to take the word of one practitioner as gospel. But I had no way of checking. Competitive businesses do not put their information online as open source for all to see. This is entirely natural as they do not want other competitors stealing their methods, but holds back the development of the field of research.
The poor-showing of NGOs at the event surprised me. Although it was emphasised the purpose of the workshop was to get practitioners networking with academics, when the attendee list was skimmed, there were very few of those end users and NGOs - the majority of those there were academics. One of the questions from the research grant call was 'What are the biggest problems facing NGOs?'. With very few there from an NGO, there was noone to answer the question. Perhaps my expectations of the number of NGOs to be there was a little high though. The gap between NGOs and academics is a problem that I keep seeing crop up just in the last few years of my PhD research. There is a realisation that NGOs and end-users need to be involved in research and collaborate or help guide the research questions of academics, but at the end of the day the gap is still pretty big between them. This call was specifically aimed at trying to bridge that gap. I hope that some collaborations come out as a result of the call.
Bridging gaps between disciplines and communicating research is supposed to be encouraged, and yet specialism is rewarded and prized at Universities. This is a huge conflict of priorities. During the workshop, the idea od a 'translator' was raised - someone who understands the science, empathises with the needs of the end-users, and is able to speak both languages and act as a broker. They are essential and valued in communicating the information between scientists and end-users. But in academia they are rarely recognised or respected - publications in academic journals appears to be the end goal. Which on the one hand is right and on the other is frustrating. Perhaps we need a new discipline in academia specifically aimed at this communication, and Geography is the department that this would really work.
Unfortunately, there is still a lack of multi-hazard research. At the workshop, there were only a few proposals talked about that were aimed at this area. And it didn't pop up at all in the discussion sessions. Academics are encouraged to be specialists, and getting round this with inter-disciplinary teams and research projects could help, but often raises more difficulties.
There were a few proposals that were aimed at tackling the multi-hazard issues, and this was encouraging. The field is obviously still new and developing, and it is slowly gathering evidence, models and information behind it. I hope this continues and I look forward to following these developments.
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