Opportunities and Incentives to Reduce Volcanic Risk: Creating Impact

This research theme is the glue that binds STREVA together. Early in the project researchers in this theme were responsible for designing and analysing the ‘forensic’ process to help us understand how the different ‘domains’ of risk interact to create negative or positive outcomes. At the end of STREVA, researchers in this theme are responsible for ‘putting the research to work’; drawing on both findings from the other themes and resilience in other contexts. Our collaborators and project partners are really important in this work and we have had three ‘Knowledge Exchange Fellows’ who have helped us understand what is (and is not) useful about our research.

This theme particularly focuses on developing innovative ways in which volcanic risk can be understood, communicated, and how that knowledge is most relevant to those who will have to make decisions. Research that joins together the physical and social sciences even needs to cope with the fact that there can be different cultures of how research is conducted (or different ‘epistemeologies’), so we have also worked on that.

Our research has demonstrated that creating shared objectives early on, and beginning by understanding the needs of those responsible for managing risk (rather than trying to shoehorn research post-hoc into risk management) are really important to generating impactful research on volcanic risk. We have developed new methods to help understand dynamic or changing risk during eruptive crises, empowered local citizens to share their risk messages and understood the relationship between preserving livelihoods and decisions that apparently act against the desire to save lives.