reduction – Cabot Institute for the Environment blog

Anna Hicks (British Geological Survey) and BUFI Student (University of Bristol) Jim Whiteley reflect on their experiences as a coach and participant of a NERC-supported risk communication ‘pressure cooker’, held in Mexico City in May.

Jim’s experience….

When the email came around advertising “the Interdisciplinary Pressure Cooker on Risk Communication that will take place during the Global Facility for Disaster Reduction and Recovery (GFDRR; World Bank) Understanding Risk Forum in May 2018, Mexico City, Mexico” my thoughts went straight to the less studious aspects of the description:

‘Mexico City in May?’ Sounds great!
‘Interdisciplinary risk communication?’ Very à la mode!
‘The World Bank?’ How prestigious!
‘Pressure Cooker?’ Curious. Ah well, I thought, I’ll worry about that one later…

As a PhD student using geophysics to monitor landslides at risk of failure, communicating that risk to non-scientists isn’t something I am forced to think about too often. This is paradoxical, as the risk posed by these devastating natural hazards is the raison d’être for my research. As a geologist and geophysicist, I collect numerical data from soil and rocks, and try to work out what this tells us about how, or when, a landslide might move. Making sense of those numbers is difficult enough as it is (three and a half years’ worth of difficult to be precise) but the idea of having to take responsibility for, and explain how my research might actually benefit real people in the real world? Now that’s a daunting prospect to confront.

However, confront that prospect is exactly what I found myself doing at the Interdisciplinary Pressure Cooker on Risk Communication in May this year. The forty-odd group of attendees to the pressure cooker were divided in to teams; our team was made up of people working or studying in a staggeringly wide range of areas: overseas development in Africa, government policy in the US, town and city planning in Mexico and Argentina, disaster risk reduction (DRR) in Colombia, and of course, yours truly, the geophysicist looking at landslides in Yorkshire.

Interdisciplinary? Check.

One hour before the 4am deadline.

The possible issues to be discussed were as broad as overfishing, seasonal storms, population relocation and flooding. My fears were alleviated slightly, when I found that our team was going to be looking at hazards related to ground subsidence and cracking. Easy! I thought smugly. Rocks and cracks, the geologists’ proverbial bread and butter! We’ll have this wrapped up by lunchtime! But what was the task? Develop a risk communication strategy, and devise an effective approach to implementing this strategy, which should be aimed at a vulnerable target group living in the district of Iztapalapa in Mexico City, a district of 1.8 million people. Right.

Risk communication? Check.

It was around this time I realised that I glossed over the most imperative part of the email that had been sent around so many months before: ‘Pressure Cooker’. It meant exactly what it said on the tin; a high-pressure environment in which something, in this case a ‘risk communication strategy’ needed to be cooked-up quickly. Twenty-four hours quickly in fact. There would be a brief break circa 4am when our reports would be submitted, and then presentations were to be made to the judges at 9am the following morning. I checked the time. Ten past nine in the morning. The clock was ticking.

Pressure cooker? Very much check.

Anna’s experience….

What Jim failed to mention up front is it was a BIG DEAL to win a place in this event. 440 people from all over the world applied for one of 35 places. So, great job Jim! I was also really grateful to be invited to be a coach for one of the groups, having only just ‘graduated’ out of the age bracket to be a participant myself! And like Jim, I too had some early thoughts pre-pressure cooker, but mine were a mixture of excitement and apprehension in equal measures:

‘Mexico City in May?’ Here’s yet another opportunity to show up my lack of Spanish-speaking skills…
‘Interdisciplinary risk communication?’ I know how hard this is to do well…
‘The World Bank?’ This isn’t going to be your normal academic conference!
‘Pressure Cooker?’ How on earth am I going to stay awake, let alone maintain good ‘coaching skills’?!

As an interdisciplinary researcher working mainly in risk communication and disaster risk reduction, I was extremely conscious of the challenges of generating risk communication products – and doing it in 24 hours? Whoa. There is a significant lack of evidence-based research about ‘what works’ in risk communication for DRR, and I knew from my own research that it was important to include the intended audience in the process of generating risk communication ‘products’. I need not have worried though. We had support from in-country experts that knew every inch of the context, so we felt confident we could make our process and product relevant and salient for the intended audience. This in part was also down to the good relationships we quickly formed in our team, crafted from patience, desire and ability to listen to each other, and for an unwavering enthusiasm for the task!

The morning after the night before.

So we worked through the day and night on our ‘product’ – a community based risk communication strategy aimed at women in Iztapalapa with the aim of fostering a community of practice through ‘train the trainer’ workshops and the integration of art and science to identify and monitor ground cracking in the area.

The following morning, after only a few hours’ sleep, the team delivered their presentation to fellow pressure-cooker participants, conference attendees, and importantly, representatives of the community groups and emergency management teams in the geographical areas in which our task was focused. The team did so well and presented their work with confidence, clarity and – bags of the one thing that got us through the whole pressure cooker – good humour.

It was such a pleasure to be part of this fantastic event and meet such inspiring people, but the icing on the cake was being awarded ‘Best Interdisciplinary Team’ at the awards ceremony that evening. ‘Ding’! Dinner served.

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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 and Anna Hicks from the British Geologial Survey.

Much like Romulus and Remus, we the academic community must take the gift bestowed unto us by the Lupa Capitolina of knowledge and enact progressive change in these uncertain and complex times.

Reflections and introductions: A volta

The volta is a poetic device, closely but not solely, associated with the Shakespearean sonnet, used to enact a dramatic change in thought or emotion. Concomitant with this theme is that March is a month with symbolic links to change and new life. The Romans famously preferred to initiate the most significant socio-political manoeuvres of the empire during the first month of their calendar, mensis Martius. A month that marked the oncoming of spring, the weakening of winter’s grip on the land and a time for new life.

The need for change

Having very recently attended the March UKADR conference, organised by the Cabot Institute here in Bristol, I did so with some hope and anticipation. Hope and anticipation for displays and discussions that conscientiously touched upon this volta, this need for change in how we study the dynamics of natural hazards. The conference itself was very agreeable, it had great sandwiches, with much stimulating discussion taking place and many displays of great skill and ingenuity having been demonstrated. Yet, despite a few instances where this need for change was indirectly touched upon by a handful of speakers and displays, I managed to go the entirety of the conference without getting what I really wanted, an explicit discussion, mention, susurration of the role of emergence in natural disaster and resilience.

Understanding the problem

My interest in this kind of science is essentially motivated by merit of my Ph.D. research, here at the School of Geographical Sciences in Bristol, broadly concentrating on modelling social influence on, and response to, natural perturbations in the physical environment, i.e. urban flooding scenarios. From the moment I began the preliminary work for this project, it has steadily transformed into a much more complex mise-en-abyme of human inter-social dynamics, of understanding how these dynamics determine the systems within which we exist, both social and physical, and then the broader dynamics of these systems when change is enacted from within and upon them externally. A discipline known broadly as Complex Physical and Adaptive Systems, of which a very close theoretical by-product is the concept of emergence.

An enormous preoccupation throughout my research to this point has been in developing ways to communicate the links between these outlying concepts and those that are ad unicum subsidium. Emergence itself is considered a rather left-field concept, essentially because you can’t physically observe it happening around you. Defined, broadly, as a descriptive term whereby “the whole is greater than the sum of the parts”, it can be used to describe a system which is characterised by traits beyond those of the individual parts that comprise that system, some examples include a market economy, termite mounds, a rainforest ecosystem, a city and the internet. Applying this concept to human systems affected by natural disasters, to interpret the dynamics therein, is quite simple but due to the vast inter-disciplinary nature of doing so is seen as being a bit of an academic taboo.

A schematic representing the nature of a complex system. Vulnerability, Risk and hazards would co-exist as a supervenient, complex hierarchy.

So then, I remind myself that I shouldn’t feel downhearted, I saw clear evidence that we, the academic community, are certainly asking the right questions now and more often than ever before;

“How do we translate new methods for vulnerability and risk assessment into practice?”
“Are huge bunches of data, fed through rigid equations and tried and tested methods, really all we need to reduce the impacts of vulnerability and exposure, or do we need to be more dynamic in our methods?”
“Are the methods employed in our research producing an output with which the affected communities in vulnerable areas can engage with? If not, then why not and how can this be improved?”

Moving forward

Upon reflection, this pleased me. These questions are an acknowledgement of the complex hazard systems which exist and indicate that we are clearly thinking about the links between ourselves, our personal environment and the natural environment at large. Furthermore, it is clear, from the themes within these questions, that academia is crawling its way towards accepted and mainstream interdisciplinary method and practice. I am pleased, though not satiated, as I witnessed a discussion in the penultimate conference session where “more data and community training” was suggested as a solution to ever-increasing annual losses attributable to natural disasters globally. I am inherently pessimistic, but I am as unconvinced by the idea of Huxleyesque, neo-Pavlovian disaster training for the global masses as I am unmotivated by the value of my research being placed in the amount of data it produces to inform such exercises!

“Don’t judge each day by the harvest you reap but by the seeds that you plant.” – Robert Louis Stevenson (image is of The Sower, from The Wheat Fields series by Vincent Van Gough, June 1888 – source: Wikipedia.)

Thus, it is as we now enter the month of April, mensis Aprilis, a month that is truly symbolic of Spring and one which embodies a time where new seeds are sewn carefully in the fields, where thorough work can take place and the seeds may be tended after the long wait for the darkness and cold of winter to pass; that we must consider the work that needs to be done in eliciting progressive change. Consider this volta, allow the warmth of the April showers to give life to the fresh seeds of knowledge we sow and may Ēostre assist us in the efficient reaping of the new knowledge we need to answer the most pressing questions in this world. At least before the data is stuck in a biblical excel spreadsheet and used to inform global anti-tsunami foot drills, or some such!

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This blog was written by Cabot Institute member, Thomas O’Shea, a 2nd year Ph.D. Researcher at the School of Geographical Sciences, University of Bristol. His interests span Complex Systems, Hydrodynamics, Risk and Resilience and Machine Learning. Please direct any desired correspondence regarding the above to his university email at: t.oshea@bristol.ac.uk.

Thomas O’Shea

Read Thomas’ other blog in this series:Sweet love for planet Earth: An ode to bias and fallacy Grey Britain: Misery, urbanism & neuroaesthetics

Tag: reduction

Participating and coaching at a risk communication ‘pressure cooker’ event