Chair: Prof. Khalid Mosalam

Co-chair: Prof. Toshio Koike

Members of the Committee:

• Prof. Khalid Mosalam, Taisei Professor of Civil Engineering and Director of the Pacific Earthquake Engineering Research (PEER) Center, University of California, Berkeley, USA
• Prof. Toshio Koike, Executive Director, International Centre for Water Hazard and Risk Management (ICHARM) under the auspices of UNESCO, Professor Emeritus of the University of Tokyo, and Council Member of Japan Science Council, Cabinet Office, Japan
• Dr. Jörgen Sparf, Mid Sweden University, Sweden
• Dr. Grace Yan, Center for Hazard Mitigation and Community Resilience, Missouri University of Science and Technology, USA
• Prof. Mahua Mukherjee, IIT, Roorkee, India

Concept Note

Committee on Science and Technology (S&T) Roadmap of GADRI

By: Khalid M. Mosalam[1]

The Global Alliance of Disaster Research Institutes (GADRI) has a vision of deepening the understanding of disasters and finding implementable solutions to achieve disaster resilience, by integrating knowledge and technologies from around the world. The Science and Technology (S&T) Roadmap is an important component of GADRI for achieving disaster resilience in the light of this vision. With this important direction and goal in mind, several envisioned elements of the S&T roadmap are listed below.

1. Advancing the science and understanding of various natural hazard phenomena, including earthquakes, wildfires, volcanic eruption, drought, hurricanes, tornadoes, sea-level rise, floods, and their relationships to climate change, using theoretical, numerical and data-based approaches.
2. Developing or adopting technologies to use vast amount of hazard-related data available in recent years towards this goal.
3. Developing tools, technologies, and methods that explore all hazards from a holistic perspective that considers commonalities and interactions between them, in addition to reducing the consequences of each hazard individually and preventing them turning into disasters.
4. Using the experiences from the COVID-19 pandemic, formulating, and preparing for the world-wide consequences of large-scale disasters from social science (e.g., potential changes on the social fabric of communities), economic (e.g., worldwide supply-chain issues), and humanitarian (e.g., physical and mental health) perspectives.
5. Using the same experiences (e.g., developing vaccines in unprecedently short time frames), formulating methods to bring available science and advanced engineering methods together for finding timely solutions for disaster risk reduction.
6. Promoting and advocating for the development and use of latest set of technologies for disaster monitoring, reconnaissance (view from the ground), short-term and long-term recovery, and related city- and regional-scale simulations, e.g., deep learning, satellite imagery (view from the sky), drone technologies, computer vision, natural language processing, high performance computing, low cost and accurate sensors, and others.
7. Developing methods to merge advanced engineering technologies with low-cost solutions that can facilitate the world-wide usage of these technologies, both in the developed world and underdeveloped and developing countries, with a special emphasis on the most vulnerable populations, for disaster risk reduction.
8. Working with other committees (Institutional Capacity Building, Networking, Data Information Sharing, and Advocacy) for effective implementation and adoption of the S&T Roadmap.

[1] Taisei Professor of Civil Engineering and Director of the Pacific Earthquake Engineering Research (PEER) Center, University of California, Berkeley, USA, Email: mosalam@berkeley.edu.