Reducing hazards during the 1990s

✍ Scribed by William E. Riebsame

• Book ID: 104635639
• Publisher: Springer Netherlands
• Year: 1989
• Tongue: English
• Weight: 195 KB
• Volume: 1
• Category: Article
• ISSN: 0921-030X
• DOI: 10.1007/bf00134835

✦ Synopsis

Almost two decades ago, a series of workshops and studies was initiated here at the University of Colorado as part of the Assessment of Research on Natural Hazards. That project sought to evaluate research needs and propose new approaches to hazard reduction. It is best remembered for having created an interdisciplinary, interagency focus on mitigating natural hazards, which were defined as resulting from the interaction of social systems and extreme natural events. The simple, but fundamentally important, insight conveyed by this definition of hazards attracted wide interest among social and physical scientists, engineers, policy makers, and hazard managers.

A call for improved hazard mitigation is currently echoing around the world in the form of the proposed International Decade for Natural Disaster Reduction. Opportunities for disaster reduction in the 1990s have been articulated recently by the National Academy of Sciences in its report Confronting Natural Disasters, by the United Nations