‘Disaster university’ to address Pacific quakes and tsunamis

US, Japanese and Indonesian academics have been working in collaboration to establish an academic network that they are calling “Disaster University,” reports The New York Times. “Something like 80 percent of disasters over the last couple of decades have been in the Asia-Pacific, and one of the problems is we’ve been in response mode and recovery mode, and not in preparation mode,” said M.R.C. Greenwood, president of the University of Hawaii. “It became clear that people have to be trained differently, and somebody has to create this new field of disaster resilience, not just disaster management and disaster preparation.”