Royal Society: Systems integration of human, ecological systems and economics in taking action on disasters, development and climate change - Opinion

By Peter Head

Reflections from Peter Head, member of the Royal Society ‘Resilience to extreme weather’ working group, on the World Conference on Disaster Risk Reduction in Sendai, Japan.

peter-head-sendaiAs we move towards international agreements on Disaster Risk Reduction, Sustainable Development Goals and Climate Change many people in Sendai have said to me that the real issue is whether we will seize the opportunity on the ground and what will change to enable this to happen. The Royal Society report on building resilience to extreme weather presented in Sendai looks at policy and the role that science can play in putting evidence at the heart of policy and local decision making.

It shows that because of urbanisation, vulnerability to disaster risk (particularly drought, heatwaves and flooding) will increase dramatically in emerging economies and so decision making, risk management and investment in city region adaptation in these countries will be critical. A feature of this report and other sessions in Sendai has been the importance of ecosystems as an integral part of successful hybrid adaptation approaches, as they can achieve protection at lower cost and yield additional support benefits of clean water, climate mitigation, cooling, biodiversity and food supply.

So urgent action needs urgent capacity building and understanding of the integration of human, ecological systems and economics in project design, in finance and insurance and the development of open-source tools that can be used by communities locally. The potential game changer is that for the first time we can combine earth observation data, crowd sourced data, systems modeling, visualisations (seen all over Sendai), economics which puts human well-being at the heart, all supported by computing fire power in the cloud. This was examined in detail in another report just launched under my curation on more effective investment in city regions, and rapid progress is being made in building and testing such a platform in China, Africa, Mongolia and Europe.