Despite the technological advances in modeling and simulation of natural hazards and their impacts on engineered systems and structures -- and the innovative mitigation techniques that have resulted -- disaster resilience is, at its heart, a matter of human resilience. The calls for more Sustainable Development originate from the recognition that human actions and decisions ultimately dictate whether natural hazards become disasters. As much as human decisions have always shaped where we live and how we build, they tragically also shape the hazards we confront, playing a significant role in climate change that has now completed that vicious cycle by intensifying tropical cyclones and other damaging weather phenomena driving record losses across human populations. Thus successful mitigation of AND adaptation to climate change can no longer be addressed independent of the UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDG) and Sendai’s calls for Disaster Risk Reduction (DDR). Recognizing their complex interplay, it is critical to chart new directions in research that address the one common denominator that connects them all: humans.  

 

​In re-architecting how we analyze, model, simulate and even discuss disaster from a more human-centered perspective, we will undoubtedly confront the need to capture, generate and discover new classes of data capable of matching this new vision for disaster research. Fortunately, the Sendai Framework provides an important roadmap for how such progress can be made, signaling the need for enhanced international cooperation around disaster data through commitments to:

1. increase accessibility to reliable, open disaster data, and 

2. promote innovations in data collection, analysis, and dissemination.  

 

This virtual workshop will bring together research communities from the United States and Japan to foster greater integration of human and societal data with natural and built-environment data to generate new insights on disaster impacts and paths toward reducing disaster risk through international partnership.