As its newly-elected President, USC Price School of Public Policy Research Professor Adam Rose presided over the 8th Annual Conference of the International Society for Integrated Disaster Risk Management (IDRiM). The Conference was held in Reykjavík, Iceland, from August 23 to 25, and was cosponsored by the Nordic Center of Excellence on Resilience and Societal Security (NORDRESS), headquartered at the University of Iceland.
The IDRiM Annual Conference was formed in 2010 as an outgrowth of several annual conferences held jointly by the Kyoto University Disaster Prevention Risk Institute (DPRI) and The International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis (IIASA). Professor Rose succeeded former DPRI Director Norio Okada as President earlier this year.
The 2017 IDRiM Conference was attended by more than 200 people from 24 countries. Major conference themes included understanding and monitoring natural hazard risk, cascading disasters, climate change and natural hazards, risk governance, media influence on public perception and response, community preparedness and response to disasters, and post-disaster recovery. A special set of sessions was reserved for presentations by graduate students in the disaster field.
Professor Rose gave presentations on post-disaster migration, co-authored with Price-CREATE post-doc Jonathan Eyer and Japanese Colleague Shingo Nagamatsu. He also gave a presentation on the E-CAT Model, a decision-support tool that reduces complex model results into simplified form to generate rapid estimates of the economic consequences of natural, man-made and technological disasters. The model is the culmination of 10 years of research and was developed in conjunction with three former CREATE post-docs. It is the second volume in the new IDRiM Springer Book Series.
Other speakers included: Ortwin Renn, Director of the Institute for Advanced Sustainability Studies; Hiro Tatano, DPRI; Stephan Hochrainer-Stigler, IIASA; Stephanie Chang, University British Columbia; Andrew Collins, University of Northumbria; Mohsen Ashtiany, International Institute of Earthquake Engineering and Seismology; Elisabeth Krausmann, European Commission Joint Research Centre; and Mahesh Prakash, Data61.
In addition, the IDRiM Society presented its annual awards at the conference. Among them, prominent sociologist Dennis Mileti received the Norio Okada Implementation Science Award for his research on hazard warning systems and his policy advising on their implementation. Professor Mileti is the former Director of the Natural Hazards Center at the University of Colorado and has previously served on the advisory boards for the USC Southern California Earthquake Center (SCEC), as well as CREATE.
Next year’s conference will be held in Sydney, Australia, and will be hosted by the Australian Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organization (CSIRO).