Tag: earthquake

#CabotNext10 Spotlight on Natural Hazards & Disaster Risk

Posted on by janet.crompton

 

Dr Ryerson Christie

In conversation with Dr Ryerson Christie, theme lead at the Cabot Institute

Why did you choose to become a theme leader at Cabot Institute?

Obviously with a decision such as this, there are numerous reasons informing our choices. However, there are three specific factors that were central to my agreeing to take this on.  First, and foremost, I am passionate about the theme.  Secondly, I have personally benefited from the work of the Cabot Institute, and as such I feel a responsibility to contribute back to the research institute.  Finally, while I have always seen value in interdisciplinarity, my own research on disasters has convinced me of the fundamental importance in increasing the ties between academic disciplines.  I should add as well that I would not have agreed to take on this role if I didn’t enjoy the people I am able to work with.

In your opinion, what is one of the biggest global challenges associated with your theme?

There are a multitude, and identifying one is difficult.  The nature of our area of focus, on natural hazards and disasters, means that we are dealing with the complex interface between geophysical processes, a changing climate, and societies.  Work across the working group relates to everything from seeking to better understand the science behind natural hazards, to how we can better design and maintain physical infrastructure, to how states and communities can reduce the potential impact of hazards.  However, if I have to pick one specific global challenge, it is how we can ensure that development can take place in a way that reduces vulnerabilities in a way that privileges the local voices in these paramount policy decisions.

As we are looking into the future, what longer term projects are there in your theme?

In a way that longer term projects that we will be undertaking in the years to come are no different from the ones in which we are currently engaged.  However, the impact of climate change is going to make the importance of these issues all the more acute.  So, we will be exploring in greater depth the intersectionality of vulnerabilities to disasters, expanding our geographic focus, and seeking further interdisciplinary approaches to these questions.

We have a number of ongoing research projects across Bristol, and I will note a few here:

Tomorrow’s Cities – The University of Bristol has a central role in this Global Challenges Research Fund (GCRF) Hub project, which is working with partners in Istanbul, Nairobi, Kathmandu, and Quito. The aim is to better understand disaster risk in the rapidly urbanising environment with the aim to ensure that future city development is resilient and addresses underlying drivers of disaster risk.

UK Flood Impacts project – This project is seeking to produce more accurate projections of the nature of UK flood risk which is crucial to ensure that policy decisions on mitigation, adaptation and development are fit for purpose.

Helping East Africa get Earthquake-Ready – focused on the East African Rift, this project is seeking to develop usable risk assessment tools to assist Malawi in disaster preparedness.  The project will also work with local authorities to co-produce planning guidelines to ensure development is resilient. A new statistical tool is being developed to help identify and help the most vulnerable sectors of society within disaster effected states.

Across the portfolio of projects in your theme, what type of institutions are you working with? (For example, governments, NGO’s)

The work that has been taking place within the hub has been extraordinary in the breadth of partners involved in the activities.  Crucially, the work is not only about targeting and helping states and communities, but it is motivated by a drive to empower communities and governments in alleviating disaster risk.  This means that the range of partners are actively involved in the entire life cycle of projects, from the identification of problems, co-designing research projects, the collection, interpretation and writing up of research, and the development and implementation of policy.  We actively work with local communities, social movements, and Non-Governmental Organizations (both local and international), all levels of Government, as well as regional and international organizations.

Please can you give some examples and state the relevant project

Tomorrow’s Cities is an exemplar here, where we are partners include community groups and formal NGOs in Quito, academics at FLACSO, the Instituto Geofisico, local and city level government representatives, and professional bodies representing engineers.  Without bringing all of these actors together we would not be able to fully appreciate the complexity of the problems, let alone develop and implement effective policies to reduce disaster risk.

What disciplines are currently represented within your theme?

We have been drawing on a broad range of disciplines, including Economics, Modern Languages, Sociology, Politics, Law, History, Civil Engineering, Geography, and the Earth Sciences.

In your opinion, why is it important to highlight interdisciplinary research both in general and here at Bristol?

The only way to redress the complex problems posed by natural hazards, is by bringing together the skills and expertise across the breadth of academia.  We can not bring about positive change by working in silos, and interdisciplinarity, while sometimes difficult, is fundamental.  We all come at the problems with different perspectives, tools and indeed language.  But we are all working for the same common ideal, of improving the lives of people, of reducing disaster risk, and doing so in a way that is empowering and sustainable.

Are there any projects which are currently underway in your theme which are interdisciplinary that you believe should be highlighted in this campaign?

All of our projects are interdisciplinary to one degree or another.  To highlight one in this respect is very difficult.  I suppose, if pushed, I would point to the work of the Tomorrow’s Cities team.  I would also like to highlight a previous project, BRACE, which was innovative in its integration of history, seismology, education, and engineering in a focused project seeking to increase resilience to Earthquakes in Bhutan.

Is there anything else you would like to mention about your theme, interdisciplinary research and working as part of Cabot Institute?

As with other working groups, our activities crosscut the breadth of Cabot and drawing lines between this working group and others is exceptionally difficult.  Cabot has been a fantastic catalyst to our work, and it is likely that little of these endeavours would have been possible without the support of the research institute.

For more information, visit Natural Hazards and Disaster Risk.

The case for case studies: a natural hazards perspective

Posted on by janet.crompton

As I wander the streets of Easton, as I have done over the last 18 months, the landscape becomes more and more familiar. Same streets, same skies. Things seem flat and still.

Living in this mundane landscape, I find it hard to believe that we live on a turbulent, roiling planet. But the Earth is not flat or still! Natural events happen daily, and extreme climatic events continue to escalate – although all we see in England is a rainy July. Some people are more vulnerable to the Earth’s vicissitudes than others. Since 2021 began, volcanoes in the Democratic Republic of Congo, Italy, Guatemala, and Iceland have erupted, and hurricanes have already gathered pace in the Atlantic. Many of these events have caused disaster for people living in these areas, losing homes, livelihoods, and lives.

Disasters erode and destroy, they leave scars and memories. We are fascinated by them: we seek to understand and to explain. How can we best do that? The case study is one way. Because of its in-depth nature, a case study is well-suited to describe disasters caused by natural hazards (earthquakes, volcanoes, landslides, floods, droughts), allowing us to tell a rich and nuanced story of events. However, we have to be prudent. There are many more natural hazards than we have scope to investigate. A good subject for a case study offers the possibility of new insights that other, limited methods have missed. Many, many times an earthquake or flood does not cause disaster. In choosing a good subject for a case study, we are looking for that event which is particularly interesting to us, and which we hope can tell us new things.

I am currently working on three case studies of disasters in Guatemala. Why and how did the disasters happen?

Coming from an Earth Sciences background, I’m not sure where to begin. There are no obvious blueprints. Why is there so little guidance on how to do a case study in our field? I think there are two reasons. Earth Sciences has always generously included other physical and social sciences (physics, chemistry, mathematics, geography), while a disaster caused by natural hazards involves both physical and social factors. So while this supports disaster’s suitability to the case study method, both science and subject use multiple philosophies and methods. It’s harder to make a cookbook with mixed methods. Secondly, Earth Sciences looks at the mutual interaction between people and nature, who operate on different timescales. Tracing a disaster through a case study requires uniting these timescales in a single narrative. That union is a difficult task and often context-specific, so not generalizable to a single blueprint. (Strangely, in an interdisciplinary case study of a disaster it’s the physical scientists who seem to study events over shorter timescales, for example on the physical triggers of a volcanic eruption. A few years ago in my undergraduate I remember tracing the story of Earth’s evolution across billions of years; now we’re operating over days and hours!)

There have been many criticisms levelled at case study research: that you can’t generalize from a single case, that theoretical knowledge is more valuable than practical knowledge, that case studies tend to confirm the researcher’s biases [1]. I have also read that case studies are excellent for qualitative research (e.g., on groups or individuals), but less so for quantitative research (e.g. on events or phenomena) [2]. I think these points are rubbish.

“You can’t generalize from a single case”, goes the argument against case studies. But generalization is not the point of a case study. We want to go deeper, to know more intimately, to sense in full colour. “Particularization, not generalization” is the point [1], and  intimate knowledge is worthwhile in itself. However, I also think the argument is false. Because it is such a rich medium, the case study affords us a wealth of observations and thus interpretations that allow us to modify our existing beliefs. As an example, a case study of the Caribbean island of Montserrat during an eruptive crisis showed Montserratians entering the no-go zone, risking their lives from the volcano to care for their crops and cattle [3]. This strongly changed the existing reasoning that people would prioritize their life over their livelihood during a volcanic eruption. How could you deny that this finding is not applicable beyond the specific case study? True, it isn’t certain to happen elsewhere, but the finding reminds us to research with caution and to challenge our assumptions. A case study might not give us a totally new understanding of an event, but it might refine our understanding – and that’s how most science progresses, both social and natural. This ‘refinement’ is also a balm for people like me who might be approaching a new case study with trepidation, concerned we might be going over old ground. Sure we might, but here we might forge a new path, there dig up fresh insights.

On the grounds of theoretical versus practical knowledge – we learn by doing! We are practical animals!

Context-dependent knowledge and experience are at the very heart of expert activity.

(Flyvbjerg, 2006) 

Does a case study confirm what we already expect to find? I think the possibility of refining our existing understanding can encourage researchers to keep our eyes open to distortions and bias. I think this final criticism comes from a false separation between the physical and social sciences. Qualitative research is held up as a contrast to “objective” quantitative research in the physical sciences, focussed on hypothesis-testing and disinterested truth. But any PhD student will tell you that the scientific process doesn’t quite work that way. Hypotheses are revised, created, and abandoned with new data, similar to how grounded theory works. And you can find any number of anecdotes where two scientists with the same data and methods came to two different interpretations. There is always some subjective bias as a researcher because (a) you’re also a human, and (b) because the natural world is inherently uncertain. (I wonder if this is an appeal for those who study pure maths – it’s the only discipline I can think of that is really objective and value-free).  Maybe qualitative/quantitative has some difference in the degree of researcher subjectivity. This would be a fascinating subject to explicitly include in those interdisciplinary case studies that involve both types of researcher – how does each consider their inherent bias towards the subject?

After flattening those objections above, I really want to make three points as to why case studies are so great.

First, they have a narrative element that we find irresistible. As Margaret Atwood said,

You’re never going to kill storytelling because it’s built into the human plan. We come with it.

A case study is not just a story, but it does have a story woven into its structure. Narratives are always partial and partisan; our case studies will be too. That’s not to say they can’t be comprehensive, just that they cannot hope to be omniscient. I love this quotation:

A story has no beginning or end: arbitrarily one chooses that moment of experience from which to look back or from which to look ahead.

Graham Greene, The End Of The Affair 

It certainly applies to case studies, too. We may find the roots of a disaster in political machinations which began decades before, or that the journey of a mudslide was hastened by years of deforestation. Attempting to paint the whole picture is futile, but you have to start somewhere.

Second, a case study provides a beautiful chance to both understand and to explain – the aims of the qualitative and the quantitative researcher, respectively. Each may approach truth and theory differently: the first sees truth as value-laden and theory to be developed in the field; the second, as objective and to be known before work is begun. It’s precisely because it’s difficult to harmonize these worldviews that we should be doing it – and the disaster case study provides an excellent arena.

Finally, the process of building a case study creates a space for dialogue. Ideas grow through conversation and criticism, and the tangle of researchers trying to reconcile their different worldviews, and of researchers reconciling their priorities with other interested people, seems both the gristle and the fat of case study research. In the case of disasters, I think this is the most important point which case study research wins. Research can uncover the most wonderful things but if it is not important to the people who are at risk of disaster, we cannot hope to effect positive change. How can we understand, and then how can we make ourselves understood? For all the confusion and frustration that it holds, we need dialogue [4]. A really beautiful example of this is the dialogue between volcano-watchers and scientists at Tungurahua volcano in Ecuador: creating a shared language allowed for early response to volcanic hazards and a network of friendships [5].

I’ve grappled with what products we should make out of these case studies. What are we making, and who are we making it for? From the above point, a valuable product of a case study can be a new relationship between different groups of people. This is not really tangible, which is hard to deal with for the researchers (how do you publish a friendship?) But a case study can produce a relationship that benefits both parties and outlasts the study itself. I think I’ve experienced this personally, through my work at Fuego volcano. I have found the opportunity to share my research and also to be transformed in my workings with local people. This has lasted longer than my PhD, I am still in touch with some of these people.

I believe in the power of case study to its own end, to create dialogue, and to mutually transform researcher and subject. And, if a new relationship is a valuable product of the case study, it is made stronger still by continued work in that area. To do that, the relationships and the ties that bind need to be supported financially and socially across years and uncertainty, beyond the current grey skies and monotony. When we are out, we will be able to renew that dialogue in person and the fruits of our labour will blossom.

[1] Flyvbjerg, 2006

[2] Stake, 1995

[3] Haynes et al., 2005

[4] Barclay et al., 2015

[5] Armijos et al., 2017

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This blog is written by Cabot Institute for the Environment member Ailsa Naismith from the School of Earth Sciences at the University of Bristol. Ailsa studies volcanic hazards in Central America.

Ailsa Naismith

 

 

Learning about cascading hazards at the iRALL School in China

Posted on by janet.crompton

Earlier this year, I wrote about my experiences of attending an interdisciplinary workshop in Mexico, and how these approaches foster a rounded approach to addressing the challenges in communicating risk in earth sciences research. In the field of geohazards, this approach is increasingly becoming adopted due to the concept of “cascading hazards”, or in other words, recognising that when a natural hazard causes a human disaster it often does so as part of a chain of events, rather than as a standalone incident. This is especially true in my field of research; landslides. Landslides are, after all, geological phenomena studied by a wide range of “geoscientists” (read: geologists, geomorphologists, remote sensors, geophysicists, meteorologists, environmental scientists, risk assessors, geotechnical and civil engineers, disaster risk-reduction agencies, the list goes on). Sadly, these natural hazards affect many people across the globe, and we have had several shocking reminders in recent months of how landslides are an inextricable hazard in areas prone to earthquakes and extremes of precipitation.

The iRALL, or the ‘International Research Association on Large Landslides’, is a consortium of researchers from across the world trying to adopt this approach to understanding cascading hazards, with a particular focus on landslides. I was lucky enough to attend the ‘iRALL School 2018: Field data collection, monitoring and modelling of large landslides’ in October this year, hosted by the State Key Laboratory of Geohazard Prevention and Geoenvironment Protection (SKLGP) at Chengdu University of Technology (CDUT), Chengdu, China. The school was attended by over 30 postgraduate and postdoctoral researchers working in fields related to landslide and earthquake research. The diversity of students, both in terms of subjects and origins, was staggering: geotechnical and civil engineers from the UK, landslide specialists from China, soil scientists from Japan, geologists from the Himalaya region, remote sensing researchers from Italy, earthquake engineers from South America, geophysicists from Belgium; and that’s just some of the students! In the two weeks we spent in China, we received presentations from a plethora of global experts, delivering lectures in all aspects of landslide studies, including landslide failure mechanisms, hydrology, geophysics, modelling, earthquake responses, remote sensing, and runout analysis amongst others. Having such a well-structured program of distilled knowledge delivered by these world-class researchers would have been enough, but one of the highlights of the school was the fieldwork attached to the lectures.

The scale of landslides affecting Beichuan County is difficult to grasp: in this photo of the Tangjiwan landslide, the red arrow points to a one story building. This landslide was triggered by the 2008 Wenchuan earthquake, and reactivated by heavy rainfall in 2016.

The first four days of the school were spent at SKLGP at CDUT, learning about the cascading hazard chain caused by the 2008 Wenchuan earthquake, another poignant event which demonstrates the interconnectivity of natural hazards. On 12th May 2008, a magnitude 7.9 earthquake occurred in Beichuan County, China’s largest seismic event for over 50 years. The earthquake triggered the immediate destabilisation of more than 60,000 landslides, and affected an area of over 35,000 km2; the largest of these, the Daguangbao landslide, had an estimated volume of 1.2 billion m3 (Huang and Fan, 2013). It is difficult to comprehend numbers on these scales, but here’s an attempt: 35,000 km2 is an area bigger than the Netherlands, and 1.2 billion m3 is the amount of material you would need to fill the O2 Arena in London 430 times over. These comparisons still don’t manage to convey the scale of the devastation of the 2008 Wenchuan earthquake, and so after the first four days in Chengdu, it was time to move three hours north to Beichuan County, to see first-hand the impacts of the earthquake from a decade ago. We would spend the next ten days here, continuing a series of excellent lectures punctuated with visits to the field to see and study the landscape features that we were learning about in the classroom.

The most sobering memorial of the 2008 Wenchuan earthquake is the ‘Beichuan Earthquake Historic Site’, comprising the stabilised remains of collapsed and partially-collapsed buildings of the town of Old Beichuan. This town was situated close to the epicentre of the Wenchuan earthquake, and consequently suffered huge damage during the shaking, as well as being impacted by two large landslides which buried buildings in the town; one of these landslides buried a school with over 600 students and teachers inside. Today, a single basketball hoop in the corner of a buried playground is all that identifies it as once being a school. In total, around 20,000 people died in a town with a population of 30,000. Earth science is an applied field of study, and as such, researchers are often more aware of the impact of their research on the public than in some other areas of science. Despite this, we don’t always come this close to the devastation that justifies the importance of our research in the first place.

River erosion damaging check-dams designed to stop debris flows is still a problem in Beichuan County, a decade after the 2008 Wenchuan earthquake.

It may be a cliché, but seeing is believing, and the iRALL School provided many opportunities to see the lasting impacts of large slope failures, both to society and the landscape. The risk of debris flows resulting from the blocking of rivers by landslides (a further step in the cascading hazard chain surrounding earthquakes and landslides) continues to be a hazard threatening people in Beichuan County today. Debris flow check-dams installed after the 2008 Wenchuan earthquake are still being constantly maintained or replaced to provide protection to vulnerable river valleys, and the risk of reactivation of landslides in a seismically active area is always present. But this is why organisations such as the iRALL, and their activities such as the iRALL School are so important; it is near impossible to gain a true understanding of the impact of cascading hazards without bringing the classroom and the field together. The same is true when trying to work on solutions to lessen the impact of these cascading hazard chains. It is only by collaborating with people from a broad range of backgrounds, skills and experiences can we expect to come up with effective solutions that are more than the sum of their parts.

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This blog has been reposted with kind permission from James Whiteley.  View the original blog on BGS Geoblogy.   This blog was written by James Whiteley, a geophysicist and geologist at University of Bristol, hosted by British Geological Survey. Jim is funded through the BGS University Funding Initiative (BUFI). The aim of BUFI is to encourage and fund science at the PhD level. At present there are around 130 PhD students who are based at about 35 UK universities and research institutes. BUFI do not fund applications from individuals.

Deploying and Servicing a Seismic Network in Central Italy

Posted on by janet.crompton
From a scientific point of view, the seismicity that is hitting Central Italy presents itself as an unmissable opportunity for seismologists to analyse the triggering and the evolution of an earthquake sequence. From the tens of instruments installed in the affected area, a huge amount of data is being collected. Such a well-recorded sequence will allow us to produce a comprehensive seismic catalogue of events. On this big quantity of data, new algorithms will be developed and tested for the characterisation of even the smallest earthquakes. Moreover, they will enable the validation of more accurate and testable statistical and physics-based forecast models, which is the core objective of my Ph.D. project.
Seismicity map of the Amatrice-Norcia sequence updated 5 November 2016.
The Central Apennines are one of the most seismically hazardous areas in Italy and in Europe. Many destructive earthquakes have occurred throughout this region in the past, most recently the 2009 MW = 6.4 L’Aquila event. On August 24th, just 43 km North of the 2009 epicentre, an earthquake of magnitude 6.0 occurred and devastated the villages of Amatrice and Accumuli, leading to 298 fatalities, hundreds of injured and tens of thousands people affected. The mainshock was followed, in under an hour, by a MW = 5.4 aftershock. Two months later, on October 26th, the northern sector of the affected area was struck by two earthquakes of magnitude 5.4 and 5.9, respectively, with epicentres near the village of Visso. To make things even worse, on October 30th the city of Norcia was hit by a magnitude 6.5 mainshock, which has been the biggest event of the sequence to date and the strongest earthquake in Italy in the last 36 years. Building collapses and damages were very heavy for many villages and many historical heritage buildings have reported irreparable damages, such as the 14th century St. Benedict cathedral. Luckily, the has been no further fatalities since the very first event of August 24.
St. Benedict cathedral (Norcia), erected in the late 14th century and completely destroyed after the Mw 6.5 earthquake of October 30th.
Immediately after the first big event, an emergency scientific response team was formed by the British Geological Survey (BGS) and the School of GeoSciences at the University of Edinburgh, to support the rapid deployment of high-accuracy seismometers in collaboration with the Istituto Nazionale di Geofisica e Vulcanologia (INGV). The high detection capabilities, made possible by such a dense network, will let us derive a seismic catalogue with a great regional coverage and improved magnitude sensitivity. This new, accurate, catalogue will be crucial in developing operational forecast models. The ultimate aim is to understand the potential migration of seismic activity to neighbouring faults as well as the anatomy of the seismogenic structure and to shed light into the underlying physical processes that produce the hazard.
Thanks to the quick response of the National Environmental Research Council (NERC) and SEIS-UK, 30 broadband stations have been promptly dispatched from Leicester and arrived in less than 48 hours in Rome. There, a group of 9 people composed by INGV and BGS seismologists, technicians and Ph.D. students (including myself) from University of Bristol, Dublin Institute for Advanced Study (DIAS) and University of Ulster were ready to travel across the Apennines to deploy this equipment. The first days in Rome were all about planning; the location of each station was carefully decided so as to integrate the existing Italian permanent and temporary networks in the most appropriate way. After having performed the ‘huddle test’ in the INGV, which involves parallel checking of all the field instrumentation in order to ensure its correct functioning, we packed all the equipment and headed to the village of Leonessa, a location considered safe enough to be used as our base camp (despite the village being damaged and evacuated after the 30th October event).
Preparing instrumentation for the huddle test in one of INGV’s storage rooms.
In order to optimise time and resources, and to start recording data as soon as possible, we decided to split in 3 groups so that we could finish our work between the end of August and the first week of September. Each seismic station is composed of a buried sensor, a GPS antenna, a car battery, a regulator and two solar panels. The current deployment will stay for 1 year and will be collecting data continually. Each sensor had to be carefully buried and levelled to guarantee the highest quality of recording, which was a strenuous challenge when the ground was quite rocky!
Typical setting of our deployed stations. On the left, the buried sensor. Its cables, buried as well, connect it to the instrumentation inside the black box (a car battery, and a regulator). On the right, the solar panel (a second one was added in October service) and the white GPS antenna.
Aside from the scientific value of the expedition, the deployment week was a great opportunity to get to know each other, share opinions, ideas and, of course, get some training in seismology! At the end, we managed to install 24 stations around an area of approximately 2700 km2.
As this type of seismic station didn’t have telemetry, each needed to be revisited to retrieve data. For this purpose, from October 17th, David Hawthorn (BGS) and I flew to Italy again and stayed there for the following ten days to service the seismometers and to do the first data dump. Our goals were also  to check the quality of the first month of recordings, to add a second solar panel where needed, and to prepare the stations for the forthcoming winter. To do that, a lot of hammering and woodworking was needed. We serviced all the sites, raising the solar panels and GPS antennas on posts, which were securely anchored to the ground, to prevent snow from covering them. The stations were all in good conditions, with just minor damages due to some very snoopy cows.
David Hawthorn (BGS) servicing the stations – A second solar panel was added. Panels and GPS antennas were raised on posts anchored to the ground through timbers.
Dumping data from the stations using a netbook and specific hard drive.
On October 26, just the night before leaving for Rome, we experienced first-hand the frightening feeling of a mainshock just below our feet. Both the quakes of that evening surprised us while we were inside a building; the rumble just few seconds before the quake was shocking and the shaking was very strong. Fortunately, there were no severe damages in Leonessa but many people in the village refused to spend the night in their own houses. Also, it was impressive to see the local emergency services response: only a few minutes after the first quake, policemen were already out to patrol the inner village checking for any people experiencing difficulties.
The small village of Pescara del Tronto suffered many collapses and severe damages after the 24 August earthquakes. View from the motorway above.
Throughout our car transfers from one site to another we frequently found roads interrupted by a building collapse or by a landslide, but we could also admire the mountains with a mantle of beautiful autumnal colours and the spectacular landscapes offered by the Apennines, like the Monte Vettore, the Gran Sasso (the highest peak in the Apennines) and the breath-taking Castelluccio plain near Norcia.
View of the Norcia plain, near to the 24th August magnitude 5.4 and the 30th October magnitude 6.5 epicentres.
View of the Castelluccio plain. This picture was taken from the village of Castelluccio, just 5 days before it was totally destroyed by the magnitude 6.5 mainshock.
From my point of view, I learned a lot and really enjoyed this experience. I feel privileged to have started my Ph.D. in leading institutions like the University of Bristol and the BGS and, at the same time, to be able to spend time in my home country (yes, I am Italian…) with such interesting scientific questions. What I know for sure is that we will be back there again.

Blog written by Simone Mancini, 1st year Ph.D. student, University of Bristol and British Geological Survey.

How Bristol geologists are contributing to international development

Posted on by janet.crompton
Guatamala.  Credit: Geology for Global Development

It maybe isn’t immediately obvious how a pet-rock-owning earth scientist is able to change the world; the basement labs in the Wills Memorial Building seem a far cry from fighting global poverty. But the study of geology and having a knowledge of the earth and its resources is actually vitally important for the success of many international development projects.

Geology for global development: what is it all about?

Geology for Global Development (GfGD) is a national organisation that wants to bring awareness to the important position that geologists are in, to be able to make a difference. And it’s not just geologists that are involved here; GfGD recognises that through the collaboration of students from a wide range of disciplines, a positive and effective contribution to development can be made. For example, earth scientists can learn a lot from anthropologists about working alongside different communities whilst being sensitive to cultural differences.

This has been the first year for the GfGD society at Bristol and so far we think it has been a great success. We have held talks covering a whole variety of topics: from volcanic hazards in Guatemala, to sustainably procuring our world’s resources, to an overview of what it is actually like to be working in aid and development as a volunteer. We aim to offer earth scientists and geographers, and anyone else who is interested, an alternative view of the opportunities available to them, aside from the more traditional career paths that often flood everybody’s radars. And alongside this, we’re also trying to raise awareness of the social science skills that are necessary for successful and sustainable development projects.

This year’s focus: volcanic hazards in Guatemala

There is one project in particular that the national GfGD group is currently working on: strengthening volcanic resilience in Guatemala. At Bristol we’re perfectly placed to contribute to this because every year students on the MSc Volcanology course spend 3 weeks studying the volcanoes in this country and learning about the agencies that are set up to monitor them. To draw on all of their experiences we held a ‘Noche de Guatemala’ to learn about this beautiful country and hear how the people living in the shadows of volcanoes are in dire need of better resources and escape routes to ensure their safety in case of eruption. As part of this event we also introduced some cultural aspects of the country as well as the current socio-political situation to put the project into context. In the discussion session that followed we saw some great suggestions for strengthening resilience, from ways to make crops that aren’t affected by volcanic eruptions, to ideas for community involvement with volcano monitoring agencies. These ideas have been passed on to the director of the national GfGD group to help inform how the project might proceed.

Noche de Guatamala at the University of Bristol. Credit: Serginio Remmelzwaal.

As well as contributing to the Guatemala project through awareness and discussions, our group has also managed to raise a fantastic £279.36 towards GfGD’s £10,000 target. This money will be used to supply improved resources to the monitoring agencies and provide educational materials for the communities affected by volcanic hazards so the risks and evacuation procedures are better understood.

Mapping for humanitarian crises

As you will probably be aware, over 9,000 miles away from the volcanoes in Guatemala, another type of natural hazard stuck violently on the 25 April this year. The 7.8 magnitude Gorkha earthquake in Nepal caused the death of more than 9,000 people and left hundreds of thousands of people homeless. We wanted to do something that could really contribute to the relief effort so we decided to hold two ‘mapathons.’ This is where a group of people get together and use OpenStreetMap with satellite images to add buildings, roads and waterways to areas where this information doesn’t exist. This work is an enormous help to aid agencies that need to know all of this information to be able to help as many people as possible.


We’ve been busy this year and can’t wait to get even more people involved next year. We’ll be back in September with more talks, mapathons and hopefully some new style events to inspire anyone interested in earth processes to think again about how their knowledge could be used to bring about positive change in the developing world.

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This blog has been written by Cabot Institute member Emily White, a postgraduate student in the School of Chemistry at the University of Bristol.

If you want to find out more about this society, request to join our Facebook group.

Email emily.white@bristol.ac.uk to join the mailing list.

 

Pearls of wisdom: The importance of knowledge exchange when facing environmental uncertainty

Posted on by janet.crompton
Dame Pearlette Louisy at the Living
at the Sharp End of Environmental
Uncertainty Conference, Bristol, 17
July 2014. Image credit: Amanda
Woodman-Hardy
On 17 July 2014, Dame Pearlette Louisy, Governor-General of Saint Lucia, came to the University of Bristol to give a keynote talk on the challenges and strategies on environmental uncertainty from Saint Lucia and the Caribbean.  Her visit marked the start of a Cabot Institute funded conference at the university, Living at the Sharp End of Environmental Uncertainty, where members of Small Island States (SIS) came together with academics and stakeholders to thrash out the problems facing SIS in a world of global environmental uncertainty.  This blog post captures some of the key points from Dame Pearlette’s talk.

Defining environmental uncertainty

 
Defining ‘environmental uncertainty’ is a tricky prospect.  What does the term actually mean?  It’s embedded into the Cabot Institute’s strapline of ‘Living with environmental uncertainty’ but it can be hard to define.  Dame Pearlette felt there were two principle components to ‘environmental uncertainty’ – a lack of knowledge and a lack of knowledge about how an environmental system will change in the future. 

Environmental challenges in the Caribbean

 
Hurricane Tomas, 2010. Image credit: Ryder Busby
The challenges facing the Caribbean are strongly based around environmental uncertainty.  It is an area highly prone to devastating natural disasters like hurricanes, earthquakes, landslides and volcanoes.   Being a small geographical area its vulnerability is increased especially as its dependence on tourism and agriculture for income can ruin its resilience by the occurrence of one natural event.  The limited capacity to develop, coupled with limited human resources and a fragile ecosystem means that the Caribbean’s ability to implement disaster risk reduction is relatively low.
One of the key things that stood out for me in Dame Pearlette’s talk was that the locals are noticing the effects of climate change already.  A little rhyme they use about the hurricance season goes like this:

June – Too Soon
July – Standby
August – You must
September – Remember
October – It’s all over

What is shocking is that hurricane season now lasts six months (June to November) leaving communities on tenterhooks for half of the year.  Comparing this to the old rhyme, it is clear to see that this is a much longer season than it used to be.
Sadly communities in the Caribbean are particularly vulnerable to all sorts of environmental impact.  Those living on reclaimed land or at sea level are prone to flooding by high water tides.  Communities also rely heavily on coastal and marine resources leaving them vulnerable when these are damaged by environmental events.  There is also the problem of getting insured in the Caribbean.  The islands are classified as high risk which has led to very high insurance premiums for people who can ill afford them.  This has led to communities not redeveloping after disasters.

Disaster management in the Caribbean

 
Haiti after Hurricane Tomas had passed through.
Image credit: DVIDSHUB
Caribbean disaster management is difficult as the people who live there cannot manage disaster responses by themselves.  However there are fantastic organisations across the Caribbean who are key to managing risk and are helping to build a resilient and sustainable future:

 

Dame Pearlette was keen to point out that enhanced international cooperation is needed if we are to improve sustainable development in the Caribbean region.  

New approaches to Saint Lucia’s landslide problem

 
Saint Lucia is volcanic in origin and it has steep slopes. Most flat land there is situated in a narrow belt, which is where most settlement is located.  Hurricane Tomas hit Saint Lucia in 2010 and it had a large impact on the community and its financial health.  Two years later there was a landslide on the main arterial road Barre de L’Isle.  This cut the island in two and caused substantial damage to infrastructure, buildings, the East Coast Road, slopes and water catchments including the Roseau Dam which collected a lot of silt.  Saint Lucia are still trying to desilt the dam which is causing water shortage problems this year. 
It is particularly difficult to reforest slopes after landslides as all the soil is swept away leaving bare rock.  Landslide disaster risk is increasing and new approaches to designing and delivering landslide risk reduction measures on-the-ground are urgently needed.  In response to that challenge, researchers at the Cabot Institute developed a novel methodology, Management of slope stability in communities (Mossaic), the vision for which is to provide low cost, community-based solutions, such as low cost drains and other related measures to reduce landslide hazard.  
 
You can read more about how the Cabot Institute has been working with St Lucia on this poster and this powerpoint presentation. 

Strategies for the Saint Lucia government

 
Dame Pearlette outlined some key strategies that Saint Lucia is implementing to improve its resilience to natural hazards and environmental uncertainty including a climate change adaptation policy; a strategic programme for climate resilience; a special programme on adaptation to climate change; a pilot programme for climate resilience; and a national environmental education policy and strategy.
However there is one key challenge and that is of funding. Saint Lucia has debts and what is troubling is that it is now difficult to borrow because lenders are not sure of Saint Lucia’s ability to pay their loans back which means the country continues to depend on external assistance of NGOs.  Although not an ideal situation, there is interesting work being funded by NGOs.  One such NGO is UNDP who are working with communities to achieve environmental sustainability with emphasis on the poor to build capacity.

Education for sustainable development – the future of environmental management?

 
At the end of Dame Pearlette’s talk, she shared her thoughts on the best way forward.  She strongly felt  that Education for Sustainable Development (ESD) is the best way to bring about environmental change.  Even though no Caribbean policy for ESD exists, there are many groups trying to embed ESD into their institutes of learning.  Dame Pearlette said that knowledge management is the management of an organisation’s knowledge assets for the purpose of creating value.  The key principle of uncertainty is about lack of knowledge.   Therefore knowledge creation and knowledge sharing is paramount for managing sustainability and thus it is the individual or country’s responsibility to ensure it keeps learning to reduce its environmental uncertainty.
Here at the University of Bristol, we also believe that ESD is a worthwhile ambition to embed sustainable development into our own curriculum. At the Cabot Institute we have appointed an intern to undertake a Community Based Learning project to place environmental postgraduate students with organisations in the local community.  By embedding our environmental knowledge and sharing it with our communities, we can help build a more sustainable world and more resilient communities to what seems to be a growing plight of environmental uncertainty.
 
This blog is by Amanda Woodman-Hardy (@Enviro_Mand), Cabot Institute, University of Bristol.
 
Further reading: The Sinking Pacific: Climate Change and Aid in Tuvalu
Amanda
Woodman-Hardy
 

 

Successful trip to Japan: workshop on probabilistic hazard assessment

Posted on by janet.crompton

 

DPRI Kyoto and Cabot Institute

Over the last two days a group from the Cabot Institute has been holding a workshop with colleagues from Kyoto University’s Disaster Prevention Research Institute (or DPRI) on the topic of probabilistic hazard analysis.  On the face of it Japan and the UK are very similar: highly urbanised and complex island societies with high population densities and therefore the potential for serious disruption if natural hazards occur.  Mind you, the earthquake, tsunami and volcano hazards do put Japan in a different league when it comes to potential impacts.  In both countries, robust hazard analysis, planning and decision making is therefore essential to protecting society.  Both countries have a lot to learn from each other, and our recent paper on lessons for the UK from the Fukushima disaster is a case in point.

Cabot members Wendy Larner, Colin Taylor, Susanna Jenkins, Jeremy Phillips, Katsu Goda, Philippa Bayleyand myself (Paul Bates) spent two days working with around 30 Japanese colleagues, with Skype presentations from the UK delivered by WillyAspinall, Jonty Rougier and Tamsin Edwards.  A full programme of the meeting is on our website, and includes pdfs of the presentations for download.  We learned a huge amount about hazard research in Japan and have hopefully begun a large number of research collaborations that will be important for Bristol University for many years.  Our profound thanks go to our Japanese hosts Prof. Eiichi Nakahita and Prof. Hirokazu Tatano, and to the Director of DPRI, Prof. Nakashima.  The photos here give a flavour of the wonderful time we had.

Possibly the most important theme to emerge from the workshop was that whilst probabilistic analysis of hazards (where we give the chance of an event occurring rather than a definite yes/no prediction) is now commonplace in science, there is still a major issue in educating decision makers, governments and the public in how to use such forecasts to take decisions.  Indeed the Daily Mail in the UK has recently been giving the Met Office a hard time for wanting (very sensibly) to move to a probabilistic forecast of rainfall. This shouldn’t be such a big problem, but the fact that it is tells us an awful lot.  Intrinsically people deal with probability information all the time: betting and insurance, for example, are both examples of probabilistic contracts that are well understood by the public. So why do we resist being told about other risks in a similar way.  My gut feeling is that it is to do with the question of responsibility. A probabilistic forecast of risk forces the decision maker (be they Ministers, civil servants or the public) to deal with uncertainty in predictions, whilst insistence on a deterministic forecast puts the responsibility for this onto the scientists who can then be blamed if things go wrong.

 

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