CHALLENGES TO VOLCANIC RISK MITIGATION

Numerous challenges to volcanic risk mitigation exist. These include availability of high-quality monitoring data, ensuring good communications with stakeholders, and developing warning systems that serve communities at risk. In the long term, reducing community vulnerability and building resilience requires more than monitoring and warning systems, it requires communities subject to volcano hazards to recognize and maintain understanding of their exposure to the hazards over long periods between eruptions.

Globally, volcanic eruptions are common over the course of any given year. However, a particular volcanic system may be dormant for periods of time that exceed the public's ability to perceive it as potentially active and hazardous. Thus, it is a challenge for communities to maintain knowledge of hazards and maintain response plans at long-dormant volcanoes because other more pressing issues often take precedence in the competition for a community's attention and resources. Volcanologists who study active volcanism and who have investigated particular volcanic systems are the principal source of information about hazards, but are usually ill-prepared to describe the societal impacts an eruption may pose. Volcano hazards assessments historically have been stand-alone reports and maps by earth scientists that focus on the various physical hazards that may occur when the subject volcano next erupts, but the physical-science focus is not easily comprehensible by the public. Exposure and vulnerability information can be useful aids in promoting a community's knowledge and understanding of the hazards and maintaining interest in preparedness. Consequently, an integrated approach to hazard assessment is required, in which scientific data about hazards is combined with sociological information about potential impacts.

To make hazard assessments more accessible and relevant to the public over the long term, earth scientists need to work with geographers and social scientists to go beyond describing only physical hazards and include analysis and presentation of how eruptive activity may affect specific aspects of a community's social system such as residential population, types of economic activity, and infrastructure and critical facilities.