7th Global Summit of GADRI:

Converging Disaster Research and Stakeholder-Engagement for Resilience

Communities, regions, and countries across the globe continue to struggle with natural and anthropogenic hazards with certain vulnerable populations often disproportionately affected, and struggle to recover following moderate to severe events.

The science and technology behind community and regional resilience has been developing for several decades with the most progress made over the last decade, but there is still a significant gap between that science and related research, and its implementation into policy to have positive effects on communities.

The seventh global summit of the global alliance of disaster research institutes will take place at Colorado State University in Fort Collins, Colorado, with the Center for Risk-based Community Resilience Planning serving as host in collaboration with the Disaster Prevention Research Institute from Kyoto University. The focus of this 7th Global Summit is on understanding and improving the relationship between science and technology, policy, and community in the context of the elements of the UNDRR Sendai Framework for Disaster Risk Reduction and the UNCC Paris Agreement, with both at their approximate midpoints.

GADRI recognizes the disproportionate effects of past decisions on future generations, and therefore a focus on gender equity, youth equity, and how we as disaster research institutes can provide science and methods to help ensure intergenerational risk equity and equitable risk transfer; and therefore there is key involvement and leadership by younger hazards and disaster researchers throughout the program. Ultimately, how do we take good resilience science, create policy, and then get solutions and decision-support into the hands of stakeholders and decision-makers at community, regional, and national levels. We know, regardless of county, the engagement of stakeholders early in the process is key since the mathematically optimal solution for communities is often impractical from a social, political, and economic standpoint.

This, in turn, necessitates a convergence approach – focusing on disciplines and methodologies – to facilitate implementation of research for improving resilience of communities. The 7th Global Summit will have three subthemes with each being a track for the parallel sessions following plenary sessions each morning.

Sub-themes

Subtheme 1 :

focuses on convergence approaches in research and implementation including methodological convergence such as combining field studies with experimental tests or numerical analysis and extending to disciplinary convergence which brings together key disciplines to collaborate to solve a problem that cannot be solved by one discipline alone. Essentially, beginning with the motivation for such novel approaches to solve disaster risk reduction challenges and solve real problems.

Subtheme 2:

focuses on engagement, partnerships, communication, and resulting policy; underscoring the fact that stakeholder engagement is critical to implementing research and turning it into policy to ensure communities don’t just survive but thrive.

Subtheme 3:

underscores the need for fundamental research and focuses on advances in disciplinary and transdisciplinary research for natural hazards, cascading hazards, the resulting disasters, and models to reduce adverse impacts.