New edited book: Calandra L.M., Forino G., Porru A., 2014, Multiple Geographical Perspectives on Hazards and Disasters, Valmar, Rome, Italy, pp. 128

I have recently co-edited the book "Multiple Geographical Perspectives on Hazards and Disasters", with Lina M. Calandra and Andrea Porru, published by Valmar, Rome (Italy). The book collects, but is not limited to, some of the contributions discussed during the IV EUGEO Congress "Europe, What’s Next? Changing Geographies and Geographies of Change", Rome, 5th-7th September 2013. Within the Congress, we organized the session "Multiple Geographical Perspectives on Hazards and Disasters" (here the full program), aiming to reflect upon the multiple significance of disasters, hazards and risks and their geographicalness within the Italian academic landscape of geographical sciences.
The book is organized in two sections. The first analyzes strategies and tools of disaster risk management in their spatial planning and assessment dimension, as well as it explores the social construction of risk in Central and Southern America and Canada. The second explores the assessment, opportunities and challenges of disaster recovery in case of some major events in India, USA and Italy.

If you are interested in the book, you can freely download here

Office for Learning and Teaching Grant Success

I am delighted to announce that our group has secured a $50,000 grant from the Australian Government Office for Learning and Teaching to develop a concept for a disaster resilience system simulator.

The project, entitled 'Modelling disaster resilience: enhancing student learning through trans-disciplinary simulation of wicked scenarios (RES-SIM)​', will be carried out by a project team led by Dr von Meding, supported by Dr Giggins and Dr Kanjanabootra from UoN and Dr Vanessa Cooper from RMIT.

This project has already attracted some media interest, with the ABC running a story online and on local radio. 

The project team are very pleased to be able to work on this project and look forward to getting up and running in early 2015! I have included a summary below. 

Project Summary:

The RES-SIM project is a collaboration between the University of Newcastle and RMIT University that proposes to develop the conceptual model for a virtually distributed computer-based teaching and learning tool that enables students within and across disciplines (e.g. engineering, architecture, logistics), both on and off campus, to collaboratively acquire essential decision-making skills through immersion in a dynamic disaster system simulation. The concept stems from game theory, competition theory and system theory. Societal systems and subsystems (e.g. health systems, transport systems, political systems) are vulnerable to a range of destabilising variables, from the immediate impacts of disasters (natural or man-made) on various system components to the subsequent responses of decision-makers. In many fields, including disaster response, simulations generally rely upon face-to-face, resource intensive scenarios or involve ‘event-based’ simulations, which fail to fully engage the systems of society that are impacted by shocks and hazards. Students are emerging from higher education with theoretical knowledge of complex systems but little in the way of tangible experience. Phase 2 of the RES-SIM project (beyond the scope of this project) will create a simulation tool that recognises these dynamics, while allowing the ‘game’ controller the flexibility to manipulate the conditions during the simulation itself to mimic the chaotic nature of disaster scenarios. This will create an environment that yields rich participatory experiences for students and embedded conceptual learning.

Disaster resilience in L'Aquila (Italy)

On 6^th April 2009, an earthquake hit the Italian city of L’Aquila and definitively compromised its pre-existing social and physical structures. In disaster studies, L’Aquila has represented the litmus of “traditional” top-down and clientelistic practices by Italian government and the strong politicization of post-disaster emergency, reconstruction and recovery. The new sprawling city resulting by institutional strategies ignored the social and spatial peculiarities of L’Aquila and trivialized the centuries-old relations between the historical centre of the city and its surrounding neighbourhoods, with current and long-term consequences for the everyday life of the inhabitants.

Several scholars have explored the multiple and complex dimensions of post-disaster L’Aquila: from psychological consequences to changes in the built environment, from social transformations to urban networks and connectivity issues, from social movements to cultural heritage damages. Recently, I have published two papers aiming to investigate the resilience process enacted by emergent grassroots groups in the reconstruction of L’Aquila. These groups are spontaneous and autonomous, and proposed and enacted own ideas and initiatives in reconstructing the city.

The first paper is co-authored with Francesca Fois; it analyses in-depth the functioning of the EVA ecovillage community in developing its own resilience process and in exploiting the window of opportunity, opened by the earthquake, through sustainable practices of everyday life. The second paper analyses and describes the disaster resilience by some emergent groups in L’Aquila, considered as a shared and bottom-up process, rather than a top-down and paternalistic outcome. The paper asserts the integration of the disaster resilience process into institutional strategies would have more successful targeted the needs of local communities during the reconstruction process. Both papers shed light on a qualitative dimension of resilience, that requires more investigation and debate in literature to clearly depict the social and political context in which disasters and related resilience take place.  

If you are interested in my papers, you can find here the first and here the second, and both on my Academia profile.

Any comment is welcome.

December Group Updates

2015 International Conference on Building Resilience

Thank you to all who have submitted abstracts for the 2015 International Building Resilience Conference from 15-17 July 2015. We look forward to welcoming a diverse group of international delegates to Newcastle and we are pleased to announce that our keynote speakers will be Professor Kevin Hall (Deputy Vice Chancellor, University of Newcastle), Professor Makarand Hastak (Head of Construction Engineering and Management, Purdue University) and Dr Louise Brooke-Smith (Global President, RICS). The abstract deadline has now been extended until 5th January so there is still time to get involved! Click here to find out more.

REACT Network

Delegates from the University of Newcastle and Beijing Normal University are currently in Taipei for the second REACT Network event. There is a full schedule planned, including research collaboration meetings, studio-based consultations with students, formal seminars and community resilience field visits. Ming Chuan University will kindly host the visit.

5th World Conference on Disaster Risk Reduction, Sendai

Dr von Meding and Dr Gajendran will be attending the 5th World Conference on Disaster Risk Reduction (WCDRR) in March as official delegates of the CIB (International Council for Building). CIB W120 Disasters and the Built Environment, the University of Newcastle and Loughborough University will host and facilitate a special public 'Built Environment DRR Research Forum'. The Forum will showcase research from around the globe that has supported the goals of the Hyogo Framework for Action over the past decade, informing the post-2015 framework with empirical and theoretical advances. A panel of international speakers will share a wealth of evidence spanning hundreds of research projects over the past decade.


Successful CAESIE Grant

A team from the group, led by Dr Gajendran, were recently successful with a proposal to fund collaborative meetings with a UK SME (Ostick & Williams Architects, Belfast). The meetings, hosted in Newcastle, will explore whether the development of a technological tool and operational framework for evaluating built environment resilience to flood events is possible within a digital environment. The staff from O&W will visit Australia in March 2015. 

Call for Papers

cfp Cross-sectorial and Multi-scalar Perspectives of Climate Change Adaptation and Disaster Risk Reduction Integration

Dear readers,

Within the 5th International Conference on Building Resilience, to be hosted by the University of Newcastle (Australia) on 15-17 July 2015, we will be holding a Special Session entitled “Cross-sectorial and Multi-scalar Perspectives of Climate Change Adaptation and Disaster Risk Reduction Integration”, organized by Giuseppe Forino, Jason von Meding and Graham Brewer (University of Newcastle).

The Fifth Assessment Report by IPCC and the post-Hyogo 2015 framework by UNISDR recognize the increasing role of climate change in exacerbating and generating disaster risks. Accordingly, the debate about the integration of Climate Change Adaptation (CCA) and Disaster Risk Reduction (DRR) is also growing among researchers and policy-makers. Scholars have investigated common grounds, barriers, challenges and opportunities of this integration, as well as its potential role in reducing vulnerability and strengthening resilience and development. With a cross-sectorial and multi-scalar perspective, this session aims to investigate theoretical frameworks and case studies related to CCA and DRR integration, exploring its meanings, practices and different approaches in terms both of policies and actions. We seek empirically grounded and theoretically informed contributions to explore this integration from any related discipline.

Suggested topics include, but are not limited to:

· Downscaling of CCA&DRR international policies
· National Adaptation Strategies/Plans and DRR
· Regional/rural/urban approaches to CCA&DRR integration
· Resilience, vulnerability, development and CCA&DRR integration
· Planning and CCA&DRR integration
· Governance approaches
· Role of stakeholders, collaboration and conflicts
· Grassroots and CCA&DRR integration
· Different meanings and perceptions of CCA and DRR among researchers, governments and stakeholders


References:

· Birkmann, J., von Teichman, K., (2010) Integrating disaster risk reduction and climate change adaptation: key challenges - scales, knowledge, and norms, Sustainability Science, 5, 171-184.

· Birkmann, J., Pardoe, J. (2014) Climate Change Adaptation and Disaster Risk Reduction: Fundamentals, Synergies and Mismatches, in Glavovic B.P, Smith G.P, (eds.), Adapting to Climate Change. Lessons from Natural Hazards Planning, Dordrecht: Springer, 41-50.

· Howes, M., Tangney, P., Reis, K., Grant-Smith, D., Heazle, M., Bosomworth, K., Burton, P. (2014) Towards networked governance: improving interagency communication and collaboration for disaster risk management and climate change adaptation in Australia, Journal of Environmental Planning and Management, DOI: 10.1080/09640568.2014.891974.

· Lei, Y., Wang, J. (2014) A preliminary discussion on the opportunities and challenges of linking climate change adaptation with disaster risk reduction, Natural Hazards, 71(3), 1587-1597.

· Schipper, L., Pelling, M. (2006) Disaster risk, climate change and international development: scope for, and challenges to, integration,Disasters, 30(1), 19-38.


Please send an abstract of 250 words to Giuseppe Forino (giuseppe.forino@uon.edu.au), Jason von Meding (jason.vonmeding@newcastle.edu.au) and Graham Brewer (graham.brewer@newcastle.edu.au) by 2nd January. We will notify the acceptance of abstracts by 3rd January. Please check all the important dates and deadlines on the conference website. After our feedback, abstracts should be submitted through the online conference management system by 5th January. A selection of papers may be part of a special issue in a peer-reviewed journal.

Key barriers in post-disaster reconstruction projects

In the 5+ years that I have been examining the operations of NGOs in post-disaster reconstruction, there have been significant moves made to combat some of the issues that have been heavily criticised in the past- skill deficiency, cultural ignorance, resource 'stretch' mentality among others. Some of the key outcomes of my work in Sri Lanka and Bangladesh have been to identify the key PDR barriers that NGOs face in seven key areas (see image below), and to provide evidence that organisations must deploy certain configurations of organisational and operational competencies in order to effectively develop and implement strategies to address these barriers.

The research argues that the utilisation of these competencies, deployed in targeted clusters, has the potential to create positive outcomes for beneficiaries as measured by PDR Project Success Indicators (PDRPSIs). If dynamic tools can be developed that effectively model competency and predict success, all organisations involved in disaster response and recovery could benefit. In addition, the knowledge is highly transferable to other sectors and environments.

If you are interested in the research, check out my new paper.

REACT Network Inaugural visit, Beijing, October 2014

As announced in July, 2014, the D&D group were awarded an Australia-China Council 2014-2015 Grant. The grant is administered by Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade and the purpose of the grant is to establish Resilience Education Australia-China-Taipei (REACT) Network. The lead collaborators are 1) Dr Jason von Meding, School of Architecture and Built Environment, University of Newcastle, 2) Prof Qian Ye, School of System Science, Beijing Normal University and 3) Dr Wan-yu Shih, Department of Urban Planning and Disaster Management, Ming Chuan University.

The inaugural REACT Network activity was a visit to The School of Systems Science, Beijing Normal University (China) 12-17 October 2014. The research team from The University of Newcastle included Assoc Prof Graham Brewer and Dr Sittimont Kanjanabootra with Dr Wan-yu Shih and Dr Wen-Yen Lin from Ming Chuan University. The delegations were hosted by Prof Zhangang Han from BNU.

This first REACT event was primarily about establishing the relationship between members from the different universities, as well as identifying common ground where team members research interests are aligned. We hope to develop research collaboration expertise to seek future funding at national and international level, as well as producing interdisciplinary research publications and resilience education initiatives. The primary research areas include, disaster, hazards, resilience, urban planning, built environment, community engagement, IT and Complex Systems, Biology and Ecology Complex Systems.

A series of meetings were held between the delegations, including virtual attendance and participation by Prof Qian Ye (in USA) and Dr von Meding (in Australia). During this visit Prof Han kindly provided a research seminar venue for REACT Network members to present their research activities for project participants, as well as for students and researchers at Beijing Normal University. The seminar included:

1. Prof Zhangang Han: Introduction of School of Systems Science and research highlight

2. Prof Qian Ye: Integrated Risk Governance Project- History, Achievement and Future Plan

3. Associate Prof Graham Brewer: Societal risk reduction, resilient adaptation and the acceptance of the evidence: reflections on the Australian policy response to climate change.

4. Dr Sittimont Kanjanabootra: The built environment, disasters and information systems.

5. Dr Wan-yu Shih: Urban planning for climate change adaptation- on-going student and research projects in Ming Chuan University

6. Dr Wen-Yen Lin: Overview of the Department of Urban Planning and Disaster Management, Ming Chuan University


The following is a summary of the REACT Network inaugural visit outcomes:

· REACT Network virtual (online) collaborative working space has been established
· REACT Network Researcher Directory has been established
· REACT Network member’s personal research areas list has been established
· REACT Network education programs mapping has been established
· Activities for next visit at Department of Urban Planning and Disaster Management, Ming Chuan University is now being developed

I would like to take this opportunity to thank Professor Qian Ye, Professor Zhangang Han and the research team at the School of System Science, Beijing Normal University for your great hospitality, administrative work and generous support for this inaugural visit.