Event Summary
Session Lead
- Trevor Dhu, AusAID
Description
The ultimate goal of almost all disaster risk reduction efforts is to build the resilience of our communities. This resiliency requires communities and government actors at all levels from local to national and across different sectors such as finance, planning and infrastructure to own and share a common and robust understanding of their risks and to take responsibility for trying to manage and, where possible, mitigate these risks.
One of the major challenges faced across the world is how do we bridge the gap between our scientists, our policy makers and our communities to ensure that we are truly making evidence based decisions across a range of disaster risk reduction and climate change adaptation actions? Can technology make this easier or do we run the risk of having a more rigorous understanding of risk without community ownership and subsequent action? How do we take advantage of the emerging culture of open data and open source software and leverage off new ways to encourage participatory mapping to ensure that communities and all levels of government are effectively:
- using new science to guide their actions; and
- advocating for increased disaster risk reduction?
Ultimately, how do we get the full value from our scientific efforts and ensure that better knowledge is reaching communities and governments in a way that is easily understood, believed and, above all, actioned?