We would like to draw your attention to the following session taking place on Tuesday, May 17, 13:00 – 15:30.

Title

Risk assessment, risk reduction and risk mitigation – what role do models, numbers, text and stories play?

Abstract

Understanding risk is the basis for strategies and actions to reduce and manage losses and damages triggered by adverse events. The term ‘risk’ is often connected with a value of probability of occurrence calculated by statistical methods and based on event databases and modelling results. Research and practice has increasingly strived for the integration of vulnerability and resilience indicators into these equations. However, ‘understanding’ risk in the sense of scrutinising the underlying root causes strongly relies on qualitative, narrative and subjective data. Drawing a holistic picture of risk as a basis for future risk reduction actions thus needs to integrate both quantitative and qualitative methodologies. This session builds upon two international expert workshops on qualitative and quantitative approaches carried out in 2014 and 2015 and aims to provide results from these workshops, as well discuss the challenges of integration with a wider audience at the UR2016.

Description

This session is co-organized by the United Nations University – EHS (Bonn – Germany) together with a number of high-level European research organizations, which are all involved in applied studies with strong user focus [namely EURAC (Bolzano – Italy),  Z_GIS (Salzburg – Austria), SEI (York – UK) and CUAS (Cologne – Germany)]. The session will be structured by key note introductory presentations, which will be followed by sufficient time for in-depth discussion. The thematic frame of our session is given by the field of DRR (Disaster Risk Reduction) and its growing overlap with CCA (Climate Change Adaptation). Against this background, particular focus will be put on following three aspects

  • Spatial analysis – assessments, risk reduction and mitigation at various spatial scales and the possibility to up- or down-scale.
  • Methodological challenges for integration – particularly touching upon the level of integration (combining or integrating methods or results)
  • Monitoring – which methods do we need and which do we have at hand in order to monitor success in DRR (and for the SFA goals and the SDGs)

We will also include a poster session with the session and would therefore invite you to present a poster (see below).

Call for posters

We invite you to present a poster of your own work that is relevant for the topic of this session. To do so, please send the following information to stefan.schneiderbauer@eurac.edu:

–          Your name

–          Your affiliation

–          The title of your poster

–          A short abstract of your poster not exceeding 150 words.

Deadline for poster submission is Friday, 18 March 2016