Understanding risk: Innovation in disaster risk assessment

The Understanding Risk conference asks 'What is risk? Can we measure it? If we understand it, can we manage it better?'

The Understanding Risk: Innovation in Disaster Risk Assessment conference will address these important questions concerning disaster risk assessment. The Understanding Risk conference will focus on innovation in the disaster risk assessment field. Experts and practitioners will showcase new approaches in risk assessment, sharing technological developments and the benefits of atypical partnerships.

The event sessions will cover various topics related to disaster risk assessment including hazard and vulnerability modeling and analysis, Geographic Information Systems (GIS), insurance and reinsurance, Web 2.0 technologies, climate change adaptation, and more.

The conference will be organized in conjunction with the 2010 Outreach Meeting of the Global Earthquake Model (GEM) initiative. GEM is a public/private partnership initiated and approved by the Global Science Forum of the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD-GSF) and supported by the World Bank. GEM aims to build a uniform, independent standard to calculate and communicate earthquake risk worldwide.

In addition, other innovative initiatives will be launched at Understanding Risk: the second DC Crisis Camp (CC) event will take place. CC is a grassroots initiative that brings together domain experts and software developers to improve technology and practice for disaster management. Concurrently, the next Random Hacks of Kindness (RHoK) hackathon will be held. This is a joint initiative by Google, Microsoft, Yahoo! NASA and the World Bank which gathers software developers to provide technological solutions to disaster risk management challenges.