Welcome to the Natural Hazards Consulting blog! This will be a blog for discussing the science and practice of forecasting and managing natural hazards of all kinds, but with a particular focus on hydro-meteorological hazards and their cross-connections to geohazards. This is not a blog for celebrating scary things that kill people, but for discussing, understanding, and learning to manage these scary things better.
And there’s a lot to talk about. One of the fantastic achievements of global cooperation and science (which will be discussed a lot in this blog) is that deaths from natural disasters are going down.
That’s great news, but it hasn’t come without effort, and it’s happening in a world of increasing vulnerability and exposure to stress. Natural hazards also cause tremendous disruption and economic damage, as well as anxiety, and these things are not trivial – indeed one the constant tensions in emergency management is getting the proportionality of response right. If we want to keep improving in natural hazards management, we need to understand how and why our hard work is paying off, and see if we can do even better.
So, in this blog, let’s talk about what works, and what doesn’t. Let’s talk about emerging hazards, forgotten hazards, and how to do hazards stuff better. Let’s talk about the local scale, where the rubber hits the road, but let’s also talk about the big picture, which also has to work well for the local level solutions to work at all. And, let’s talk about talking, because it’s pointless being able to predict the occurrence of a natural hazards with 100% certainty without being able to communicate to the potentially affected population – that way lies (literally) disaster.
Welcome aboard.