Cabot Institute for the Environment blog

A very long and tiring day on Tuesday 29 May, but well worth it because our joint event with AXA - Volcanoes and Society - was a huge success.   Here, Kathy Cashman was awarded £500,000 by the AXA Research Fund to study ash cloud dangers .    We had a fantastic turn out of volcanologists, businesses and post grads and other interested parties.   All the talks were very interesting and the whole event was filmed.   We will put this on the website once editing has been completed and we will be holding a follow up event later in the year, so stay tuned! Also watch out on the Cabot website as we will soon be releasing case studies about NERC funded research in Cabot related areas.   There will be no weekly roundup next week, but I will be back on Friday 15 June to update you on what happened at the Cabot Steering Group meeting

The External Advisory Board went very well on Tuesday. Ties came off in the heat and we learned some very interesting things from Prof. Mark Eisler whose work in farm animal health relates to Cabot’s wider remit in food security.   Philippa Bayley went to London to the Worldwide Universities Network (WUN) Adapting to Climate Change meeting. She met with people from around the world who are trying to do similar work to Cabot and are struggling with the same issues as us, e.g. how to get a critical mass of people working on the problems we face whilst maintaining a breadth of research areas. Paul Bates has posted a blog on the successful trip to Japan, read here . I have uploaded all the presentations from the workshops at Kyoto DPRI. There are some really interesting presentations on natural hazards including wind, tsunamis, floods, landslides, storm surges, volcano

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 Bayley and myself ( Paul Bates ) spen

This week has been the busiest week I’ve had whilst working for Cabot , especially with Philippa Bayley and Paul Bates out of the office on business.  Their business this week has been visiting the Disaster Prevention Research Institution (DPRI) in Kyoto, Japan.  The DPRI , with Cabot , are holding a joint workshop called ‘ Probabilistic Hazard Risk Assessment and Beyond’.     Those involved from Cabot are:   Professor Paul Bates Professor Colin Taylor Professor Wendy Larner Dr Katsu Goda   Dr Jeremy Phillips   Dr Susanna Jenkins   Dr Philippa Bayley   ProfessorWilly Aspinall   Dr Jonathan Rougier   The workshop themes revolve around several key areas: c limate change impacts decision-making and disaster risk reduction under uncertainty new mathematics and models, defining and using worst case scenarios, interconnected hazards h uman and social dimensions of a disaster. This should be a great relationship building event and also a fantastic

Cabot had an interesting presentation from Krish Sankaran of the World Economic Forum on 3 May 2012.  This link leads to a video showing the three main risks that the World Economic Forum sees the world facing today. What do you think? http://www.weforum.org/issues/global-risks