Meeting the international risk and disaster management community @ IDRC 2012 in Davos

The two-yearly International Disaster and Risk Conference (IDRC) 2012 was hosted in Davos, Switzerland and to my surprise I was the only representative of Disaster Studies (and Wageningen UR as well). Quite a challenging task! Although the main reason for participating was the opportunity to do a poster presentation on my previous and future work on flood risk management, I also worked as a volunteer for the organization, the Global Risk Forum. This means I had to act as a ‘host’ for conference visitors and support sessions, for example with reporting and session management. A perfect way to combine attendance with helping out the organization, who funded most part of my stay in return.

IDRC is ‘the place to be’ to meet with the international community working in the field of risk and disaster management. The volunteering work gave me numerous opportunities to get in touch with several representatives of institutes that are potential supporters or even partners of my research plans. The PEDRR is a very interesting network, but I could also establish contact with the UN-ISDR, IFRC, FAO and UNDP who are all active, each from their own perspective, in the field of flood risk management. They work in the Bangladesh and Vietnamese deltas and I was already invited to visit some of their running projects there. I got quite a number of enthusiastic reactions on my research plans.

Sessions I participated in were titled ‘Environment and Disaster Risk Reduction: from theory to practice (hosted by PEDRR)’, ‘Integrative risk management’, ‘Mobilising the creation of a risk culture’, ‘Risk, society and culture’, ‘Disasters, environment and migration (with Anthony Oliver-Smith and Jörn Birkmann as panellists)’, ‘Flood Risks’ and ‘Ecosystem based approaches’ (both poster presentations). In later blogs in will zoom in on interesting details of some of them. A last worthy remark on Elsevier’s launchof a new, International Journal of Disaster Risk Reduction.

Both in terms of content and ideas, and getting in touch with interested individuals and potential partners for research collaboration of support, the visit was quite successful. I'd recommend to go again in two years time as a group trip!