Session on “Global Disasters: Addressing the Risk Associated with Extreme Geohazards”

Organized by the GHCP at GEORisk 2014 with support from, and in coordination with, the European Science Foundation.

GEOHAZARDS, MONITORING NETWORKS AND SYNERGIES

Paola Campus, European Science Foundation (ESF), 1 quai Lezay-Marnésia, BP 90015, 67080 Strasbourg cedex, France

The recursive occurrence of geohazards (among which volcanic eruptions, earthquakes, tsunamis, bolides) on our Planet throughout the last few millennia has often impacted human settlements on local and regional scales, causing significant deaths and losses of goods and structures. In some extreme cases such events have so dramatically impacted the environment on global scale to inflict catastrophic losses to populations.

The current status of our Planet, characterized by societies progressively clustering around megacities, often located in hazardous areas and heavily depending from fast and efficient transfer of information and persons faces the crucial challenge of developing an effective resilience program to geohazards and, in particular, to extreme geohazards.

Most of the decision-making and emergency centres are located in large settlements or megacities, making it thus crucial to assure a constant and efficient level of sustainability of such structures in order to enable timely decisions and support actions at local, regional and global level even under the worse environmental conditions.

The development of an effective Disaster Risk Reduction program and of a consequent robust resilience program needs to be based on a holistic approach, addressing scientific, technical, logistic, social and policy aspects related to hazards and involving all the principal stakeholders facing this challenge: scientific experts of geohazards, social sciences experts, government officials and policy makers.

The main tool supporting such holistic approach should be a Global Network of Monitoring Systems, based on synergetic technologies capable of acquiring and sharing in real-time (or near-real time) high quality data recorded on a global scale: the systematic and comprehensive analysis of such data would allow the development of a deeper understanding of the phaenomena associated to geohazards and would enable the principal stakeholders involved in Disaster Risk Reduction and Resilience to issue early warnings to populations.

Some examples of events and of the contribution to their monitoring through existing global networks will be provided.