BEIJING—The Integrated Research on Disaster Risk (IRDR) Conference 2011 kicked off Monday in Beijing with an opening ceremony featuring addresses from leading members of the scientific community. The speakers stressed the importance of disaster research, while recognizing the serious shortcomings in current approaches.
“It should no longer be acceptable for people to lose their lives from disasters because they live in places experts knew to be disaster-prone in the first place,” emphasized Yuan Tseh Lee, Nobel Laureate and President of the International Council for Science (ICSU). Lee told delegates from some 40 countries that IRDR is “without question“one of the most important initiatives in ICSU’s upcoming strategic plan.
Chair of the IRDR Scientific Committee Gordon McBean led the opening ceremony to commence the three-day conference, themed “Disaster Risk: Integrating Science and Practice”. McBean is President-elect of ICSU, and he served on the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, sharing the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize.
The morning also saw talks from Han Qide, Chair of the China Association for Science and Technology (CAST); Heide Hackmann, Executive Director of the International Social Science Council (ISSC); and Margareta Wahlström, the U.N. Secretary General’s Special Representative for Disaster Risk Reduction, who delivered a message from Geneva via a pre-recorded video.
The conference is a major step forward in the IRDR program’s goal to bring together researchers, policy makers, and other stakeholders from diverse geographic, scientific, and institutional backgrounds. The program was founded on the idea that a new approach to disaster reduction was necessary in the face of increasing disaster losses. Co-sponsored by ICSU, ISSC, and the U.N. International Strategy for Disaster Reduction, IRDR was launched in 2010 with the ambition to complete its mission in 10 years. The IRDR International Programme Office (IPO) is hosted in Beijing at the Center for Earth Observation and Digital Earth, an institute of the Chinese Academy of Sciences. The IRDR IPO and CAST are co-organizing the conference.
