Symposium in Disaster Resilience and Built Environment Education
Mon, 28 Sep 2015 10:23:00 BST
Global Disaster Resilience Centre, University of Huddersfield, UK hosted a symposium on disaster resilience and built environment education: celebrating project successes from 16th to 18th September 2015 in Huddersfield, UK
Photo: CENEAST project team
The future resilience for disasters rests upon shortening the distance between emerging scientific evidence and actionable policy. A rising trend in natural and man-made disasters underlines the need for a well-coordinated European action, both in terms of response and also in terms of preparedness and prevention. New legislation to strengthen European policy on disaster management was approved in December 2013. The revised legislation aims at further improving cooperation and coordination to strengthen preparedness, and provide for a fast and efficient response when a disaster strikes. This means better protection for EU citizens and affected communities worldwide.
Photos: delegates during session
It is with this context that the Global Disaster Resilience Centre at the University of Huddersfield had the pleasure of welcoming delegates to this Symposium on Disaster Resilience and Built Environment Education, which was organised in association with three EU based projects aimed at increasing our resilience to disasters and developing built environment education: CEN-EAST (Reformation of the Curricula on Built Environment in the Eastern Neighbouring Area); RESINT (Collaborative Reformation of Curricula on Resilience Management with Intelligent Systems in Open Source and Augmented Reality); CADRE (Collaborative Action towards Disaster Resilience Education). The projects brought together delegates from across Europe and beyond, including international experts from Belarus, Estonia, Italy, Lithuania, the Russian Federation, Sri Lanka, Ukraine, and the United Kingdom.
In welcoming the guests to University of Huddersfield, our Vice Chancellor Professor Bob Cryan: “ Partnerships between researchers in both Western and Eastern Europe and in Russia are greatly to be welcomed. This centre typifies perfectly our ambition for the University of Huddersfield to achieve a high international profile. It has formed strategic partnerships with more than50 international universities and institutions, in Asia, Africa, North America, Europe, and Australia. The Centre’s aim is to play a big role in shaping the built and the human environment in order to limit the effects of disaster and to aid reconstruction. These goals are shared by all of you. I gather that a new phase of research and collaboration is to get underway. One door shuts, but another rapidly opens and the valuable partnerships that you have assembled should remain intact”.
Photo: Our Vice Chancellor Prof Bob Cryan, addressing the gathering
The importance of international cooperation and global partnership to tackle disaster risk and increase resilience is explicitly recognized in the Sendai Framework for Disaster Risk Reduction 2015-2030that representatives from 187 UN member States adopted in March 2015 as the first major agreement of the post-2015 development agenda. It recognises that in addressing economic disparity and disparity in technological innovation and research capacity among countries, it is crucial to enhance technology transfer involving a process of enabling and facilitating flows of skill, knowledge, ideas, know-how and technology. This what we tried achieving with the symposium.
Download the published book of abstracts of the symposium here
