ABSTRACT
The aims of the conference on ‘Disaster Risk Reduction for Natural Hazards: Putting Research into Practice’ were twofold: to examine how natural hazard research is accessed and used by practitioners and decision and policy makers; and to explore how policy and practice inform research. The conference successfully brought together participants from the humanitarian and development sectors, academia, business, government and funding agencies. It is rare to engage such a wide range of sectors in a single meeting and, consequently, it was possible to develop a multi-sector perspective on how stakeholders respectively undertake or engage with natural hazard research. Debates highlighted the need for greater dialogue, understanding and collaboration between all the sectors represented if research is to be made relevant and generate significant impact. There is an urgent requirement to better understand respective needs, ways of working, project timescales and funding mechanisms, as well as the challenges posed by institutional and organizational structures and functions. Far too much academic research is still user-unfriendly, and practitioners do not adequately engage in, and with, research, particularly that produced within the natural sciences. In addition, there are growing opportunities for non-government organizations (NGOs) and academics to work with business on a number of disaster risk reduction (DRR) topics that have yet to be fully explored, such as quantitative risk assessment, catastrophe modelling and micro-insurance. The natural hazards that received the most coverage during the conference were volcanic and seismic in origin, despite the fact that windstorms, floods and droughts caused the greatest human losses during the last decade. 1 Very little connection was made between global environmental change and natural hazards, which was somewhat surprising given the current focus on the potential impacts of climate variability on vulnerable populations (see Krishnamurthy, 2011).What follows is a general summary from the conference presentations and discussions on a number of key themes that emerged during the event.
