Rapid Georisks: Social, geoscience, and engineering perspectives on risk and resilience

December 16th-18th, 2018, Virginia Tech’s Global Forum on Urban and Regional Resilience will be hosting a broadly interdisciplinary symposium focused on the specific challenges for community resilience posed by infrequent, unpredictable-but-inevitable natural events, including earthquakes, tsunamis, volcanic eruptions, and landslides.

Natural hazards that exhibit low frequency and a rapid onset are characteristically difficult to forecast and thus present unique challenges for risk and resilience planning. There is a robust scientific understanding of the driving forces behind earthquakes, tsunamis, volcanic eruptions, and landslides; however, this knowledge does not permit reliable prediction of an event’s occurrence until it has already begun. Some regions with well-established risk from such hazards have mobilized resources to support preparatory actions, while others have done very little. We wish to establish a comprehensive discussion focusing on the challenges presented by low frequency + rapid onset natural hazards in order to further equitable and sustainable preparedness initiatives in both robust and fragile economies.

Some of the questions we wish to explore include:

1. How do we prevent exploitation of uncertainty/unpredictability narratives?
2. How do cultural norms affect individual and governmental decision-making related to risk?
3. How does prior experience (or lack thereof) affect post-event response and preparation for the next event?
4. Are mitigation and response patterns unique to the type of event? What are the commonalities?
5. What are future directions for the science of natural disaster preparedness and recovery and the creation of resilience policy?

This will be a small symposium to facilitate in-depth, interdisciplinary discussions of these topics, presentations of new/work-in-progress research, topical syntheses, conceptual debates, and case studies in preparatory actions, post-event responses, and integration of the underlying hazard science.