Associate Professor Lidia Mayner from the Torrens Resilience Institute has been involved in writing an important new international disaster response document – the Hazard Definition & Classification Review: Technical Review.

As a global initiative of the United Nations Office for Disaster Risk Reduction and the International Science Council, this project aims to standardise and characterise hazards, serving as a basis for countries to assess and enhance their risk reduction policies and operational risk management practices.

The organisations launched this ambitious science project in 2019 to identify the full scope of all hazards relevant to the Sendai Framework for Disaster Risk Reduction 2015-2030 – one of three landmark agreements adopted by the United Nations in 2015 – and the scientific definitions of these hazards.

The broad range of hazards, and the incrementally interconnected, cascading and complex nature of natural and human-induced hazards, including their potential impact on health, social, economic, financial, political and other systems, calls for a standardised fully-fledged characterisation of hazards that serves as a basis for countries to assess and accordingly enhance their risk reduction policies and operational risk management practices.

The project was supported by the Integrated Research for Disaster Risk program of the International Science Council, bringing together scientists, technical UN agencies and other experts from the private sector and civil society.

The Chair for this project was Professor Virginia Murray, Consultant in Global Disaster Risk Reduction for Public Health England and a long-time associate of Torrens Resilience Institute.

The completed document – including six targeted recommendations – will now be used globally in disaster risk reduction and is the result of international collaboration with real impact for the sector.