Promoting Disaster Science and Disaster Science Communities as Part of Sound Disaster Preparedness

Abstract:

During disasters, effectively engaging the vast expertise of the academic community can help responders make timely and critical decisions. A barrier to such engagement, however, is the cultural gap between reward systems in academia and in the disaster response community. Responders often are focused on ending the emergency quickly with minimal damage. Academic scientists often need to produce peer reviewed publications to justify their use of time and money. Each community is used to speaking to different audiences, and delivering answers on their own time scales. One approach to bridge this divide is to foster a cohesive community of interdisciplinary disaster scientists: researchers who focus on crises that severely and negatively disrupt the environment or threaten human health, and are able to apply scientific methods in a timely manner to understand how to prevent, mitigate, respond to, or recover from such events.

Once organized, a disaster science community could develop its own unique culture. It is well known in the disaster response community that all the preparation that takes place before an event ever occurs is what truly makes the difference in reducing response time, improving coordination, and ultimately reducing impacts. In the same vein, disaster scientists would benefit from consistently interacting with the response community. The advantage of building a community for all disasters, rather than for just one type, is that it will help researchers maintain momentum between emergencies, which may be decades or more apart. Every disaster poses similar challenges: Knowing when to speak to the press and what to say; how to get rapid, actionable peer review; how to keep proprietary industry information confidential; how to develop “no regrets” actions; and how to communicate with decision makers and the public. During the Deepwater Horizonspill, I personally worked with members of the academic research community who cared not whether they got a peer reviewed publication out of their efforts: the spill was a crisis, and they felt it their duty to respond to the limits of their ability. And I worked with first responders who craved good scientific information for making decisions. By creating a community for disaster science, we might encourage and better reward such selfless service.