Increasing Resilience to Natural Hazards

What is Increasing Resilience to natural hazards in volcanic and earth-quake prone regions?

This is a research programme to increase resilience to natural hazards such as volcanoes and earthquakes. (See story on our website)

Earthquakes cause enormous human suffering and economic damage and over the last two decades have been responsible for the loss of over half a million lives, at a cost of billions of dollars. Volcanoes have caused 200,000 deaths over the last 200 years.

The longer-term economic and social costs of disasters, such as damage to local or regional economies, impacts on health,well-being, housing and education are immense, particularly in the developing world and the World Bank says that every dollar spent in preparing for a natural disaster saves seven in response.

What will the programme do?

The goal is to build resilience in earthquake-prone and volcanic regions by reducing the risks from multiple natural hazards.

The objectives are:

1. Identify zones of greatest earthquake hazard
2. Characterise volcanic hazards to inform decision-making in volcanic crises
3. Improve spatial and temporal understanding of landslides and mudflows in earthquake-prone and volcanic regions
4. Build economically and socially viable resilience into the assessment, planning, and management of natural hazards
5. Increase uptake of natural hazard advice through improved risk analysis and communications as well as governance research
6. Make sure that lessons learnt from volcanic and earthquake disasters are also learnt in other areas, such as flooding.

Expected outputs

Increasing resilience in earthquake-prone regions:

• Better forcasting of earthquakes, landslides and mudflows and better understanding of the factors that control these
• Improved uptake of advice in earthquake-prone regions; finding out why advice is not necessarily used; and researching ways to overcome this. This includes ownership, incentivisation and enforcement and will take into consideration cultural, social, political and economic factors

Increasing resilience in volcanic regions:

• Forecasting the timing of volcanic hazards (including initiation, speed of onset, duration, frequency, and temporal distribution)
• Improved forecasting of landslides, mudflows and lahars in volcanic regions and the natural and human-related factors that control this, to improve early warning systems and planning.   

Improved Uptake of advice in volcanic regions

• Improved risk assessment through both joint hazard assessment of volcanic hazards, landslides and mudflows, as well as vulnerability components
• Find out the barriers to advice being taken up and ways to overcome this.

Who will benefit?

Society:

The programme will benefit society by helping to mitigate the effects of earthquakes and volcanoes and by building societal resilience, for instance through capacity building and emergency preparation.

Government:

The programme will assist governments in decision-making related to natural hazards.

The programme will encourage and foster links between researchers and stakeholders such as regulators, insurers, governments, government departments, local groups, education providers and non governmental orgaisations.

PROGRAMME FACTS AND FIGURES

Start and end dates: 2010 to 2015
Website: http://www.nerc.ac.uk/research/programmes/resilience/