This monthly speaker series presents cutting-edge research and approaches on the resilience of urban and rural communities and systems to hazards and disasters. The speakers represent the core faculty of Portland State University’s new transdisciplinary Emergency Management and Community Resilience graduate program. The talks will critically focus on local and global issues and share pragmatic solutions.
Learn about upcoming speakers and degree programs:
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Learn from Japan's Earthquake and Tsunami Crisis
Masami Nishishiba and Hiro Ito
On March 11, 2011, exactly ten years ago, a magnitude 9.0 earthquake hit the Tohoku region, Japan. With the following massive tsunamis hitting the coastal area, approximately 18,000 people were killed and hundreds of thousands of buildings and communities were destroyed. While this tragedy was disheartening and traumatized the local communities, it also provides us with important lessons on how to be prepared for an earthquake and tsunami disaster. Professors Ito and Nishishiba have visited the region several times with PSU students and community members from Oregon. In this presentation they will talk about what they learned from people in the Tohoku community and what we can do to be better prepared for the “Big One” in the North Pacific region.
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Geodisaster Resilience – Quakes, Floods, Slides and More
Scott F. Burns
Dr. Scott Burns has over 50 years of experience with geo-disasters all over the world. He will talk mostly about earthquakes, landslides, floods, volcanic eruptions, fires, and tsunamis in the Pacific Northwest but will use examples from all over the world. Emergency managers first need to understand the potential geo-disasters of their region and then prepare the community (businesses, families, schools, hospitals, police, etc.) for these. An understanding of the potential geo-disasters of the area is fundamental for any Emergency Manager.
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Lessons from Rural Disaster Recoveries in Nepal
Jeremy Spoon
Disaster recovery is multidimensional and takes time depending on vulnerabilities. Resilience relies on adaptive capacity or the ability and intention to recover. Nepal’s catastrophic 2015 earthquakes and aftershocks provide critical lessons on rural and Indigenous disaster recoveries in biophysical extremes. To understand tangible and intangible recovery dynamics over the short-term, we identified recovery indicators, demographics, and five domains of adaptive capacity composed of multiple variables: hazard exposure, institutional participation, livelihood diversity, connectivity, and social memory. We surveyed 400 households in two accessible and two inaccessible clusters of settlements at 9 months and 1.5 years after the events and returned at 2.5 years to communicate findings and receive feedback. We will share our lessons learned and recommendations from this study and their relevance to our local region. We will also introduce PSU’s new Emergency Management and Community Resilience Program.