How risk research can inform professional practice — experiences from disaster risk management research in Sweden

Risk research can be of great importance for professional practice, and vice versa. However, to connect the two domains is not always easy. During a period of over 15 year scholars at Lund University have been conducting research in close collaboration with professionals working with disaster risk management (DRM) in Sweden. The presentation is based on some of the experiences from several research programs during this period. It starts with a presentation of disaster risk management in general and use the Swedish DRM system to exemplify. Then follows a presentation of a research framework that has been used to ensure both scientific rigor and practical relevance of the results. And finally, the use of the framework is exemplified by describing several studies focusing on helping professionals improve their practice. One important practical problem addressed by the studies are how to aggregate risk information from several sources.