About the Project

STREVA (2012-2019) is an innovative interdisciplinary project that worked collaboratively across different disciplines to develop and apply a practical and adaptable means to analyse risk. New knowledge has been used to generate plans that will reduce the negative consequences of volcanic activity on people and assets.

Led by the University of East Anglia (UK), the STREVA project brings together diverse researchers from universities and research institutes from within the UK and from those areas affected directly by volcanic activity.

 

THE PROBLEM

Understanding volcanic eruptions is never going to actually prevent them from happening.

When volcanoes do erupt they can cause both direct loss of life and indirect loss of livelihoods via the destruction of resources and infrastructure such as crops, buildings and water supplies.

STREVA's AIMS

The premise of the STREVA project initially was that we needed to begin by characterising the important elements of this dynamic risk, primarily by understanding the key drivers behind previous volcanic emergencies in our study region. Specifically we wanted to understand:

  1. How we can improve methods to forecast and communicate eruptions and changes in activity during eruptions?
  2. How to improve predictions of areas at risk (the ‘footprint’) from different volcanic hazards? (Here we focused particularly on lahars, and latterly volcanic ash)
  3. How to improve understandings of the social, political and institutional drivers that act to make  people and their assets more vulnerable to volcanic threats?
  4. How we can better integrate this knowledge to create incentives and opportunities to reduce volcanic risk?

Who We Are

The STREVA project brings together diverse researchers from universities and research institutes from within the UK. However, a crucial component of the project’s success is our close collaboration with a number of project partners.

These include colleagues from other UK institutions, universities and research programmes based elsewhere, national and local government agencies and research organisations working in our case study locations. Several of our partners have research programmes with complementary missions, encouraging co-production of knowledge across a broad science base. At our case study locations, we collaborate with those responsible for monitoring, preparing for and responding to those threats and through them with the communities facing volcanic threats including disaster managers and policy makers.

 

Who we are >>