Integrated Disaster Risk Reduction for extreme climate events: from early warning systems to long term adaptation and resilience building
In contemporary society, the capacity of communities and governments to manage expected and/or unexpected extreme climate events depends heavily on effective governance throughout the entire Disaster Risk Management cycle. This covers operational mechanisms ranging from short-term actions (e.g. early warning and forecast-based actions) to long-term adaptation strategies and resilience building, including nature-based solutions. A coherent integration between Disaster Risk Reduction, Climate Adaptation policies and Sustainable Development Goals as fostered by the European Green Deal and major UN initiatives should result in a comprehensive resilience framework, while improving synergies and coherence among the institutions and international agencies involved.
The effective implementation of global and European risk governance and policies to enable integrated disaster risk reduction for extreme climate events requires a collaborative involvement in risk assessment and information sharing across involved institutions, including the civil and private sector and the population.
Cross-regional, cross-border and cross-sector agreements covering all phases of Disaster Risk Management can improve the knowledge about extreme climate events such as forest fires, droughts, floods, heatwaves, storms and storm surges. In addition, improving effective prevention, preparedness and response rely upon specific national or local expertise and experience. It is important to overcome silos between technical and political authorities at all levels and advocate integration among involved actors. Multi-risk governance frameworks related to climate extremes, shifting from single to multi-risk thinking in governmental agencies, represents the key challenge for the future, considering how measures to improve the resilience of the built environment and communities may provide effective solutions to strengthen adaptation measures.
Creating an overview of existing knowledge, integrating tools and developing new ones for resilience and emergency management should include careful planning for interoperability amongst many actors. It is important that solutions pay attention to societal side-effects of integrating data about emergencies, for instance Apps, where persons concerned tend to share more willingly, but do not reflect consequences of that. Thus, the development of data management tools for emergencies need to respect fundamental rights, data protection and avoid function creep.
This topic requires the effective contribution of SSH disciplines and the involvement of SSH experts, institutions as well as the inclusion of relevant SSH expertise, in order to produce meaningful and significant effects enhancing the societal impact of the related research activities.
Where possible and relevant, synergy-building and clustering initiatives with successful proposals in the same area should be considered, including the organisation of international conferences in close coordination with the Community for European Research and Innovation for Security (CERIS) activities and/or other international events.