The Missing Link: The Need for Disaster Science

ICPEM is delighted to join with our partners - UCL IRDR, the National Preparedness Commisison and the ISRM to host a webinar to discuss the important topic of Disaster Science. 

The recently released House of Lords report into the state of the UK risk and crisis management readiness, ‘Preparing for Extreme Risks: Building a Resilient Society’, is coruscating in its findings as to the systemic weaknesses that are built into the UK strategic risk and crisis management structures and frameworks, weaknesses that have been repeatedly revealed as the challenges of responding to the Covid-19 pandemic have demonstrated critical gaps and failures.

The fundamental question, asked both in the report and in the wider discussions across multiple sectors, is why weren’t we better prepared for an event that had been predicted, exercised and modelled over a number of years, and whose intrinsic vulnerabilities had been identified on a regular basis from multiple sources.

This webinar, featuring prominent experts from four leading organisations, will ask the question, ‘Why do we not have a better understanding of disaster science, and why is that not being embedded into the heart of UK’s national strategic risk and crisis management planning and preparation?’.

These are issues that are not only applicable to Covid-19, but to the full range of increasingly high impact disruptive and destructive events that we need to prepare ourselves to face over the coming years, whether from climate change and adverse weather events, infrastructure failures, social movements or malicious attack.

Panellists

Lord Toby Harris F.ISRM, Chair of the UK National Preparedness Commission and President, ISRM

Professor David Alexander, FICPEM, F.ISRM, Vice President of the Institute of Civil Protection and Emergency Management (ICPEM) and Professor at Institute for Risk & Disaster Reduction, University College London

Dr Karen Reddin, FICPEM, Senior Lecturer, Immersive Environments for Disaster, University of Bournemouth

Facilitator: Dr David Rubens, F.ISRM, Executive Director, ISRM

This event is free to attend, and open to all. Registration