A NATIONAL RESEARCH AGENDA FOR HAZARDS, RISK, AND RESILIENCE

Sudden events such as earthquakes, floods, hurricanes, landslides, tsunamis, volcanic eruptions, and wildfires pose immediate threats to the health of people and the environment but can also cause widespread and long term ripple effects that are often not anticipated, such as housing, water, material, energy, and food shortages. Longer-term, chronic hazards such as sea-level rise, coastal erosion, and climate-related changes may threaten our social structures, economy, and ecosystems unless we adapt to and manage these changes. The U.S. Geological Survey's response to Hurricane Katrina characterized the inherent geological, hydrological, chemical, ecological, and health hazard challenges of such events, and highlighted the power of linking these sciences to formulate understanding, mitigation, and restoration. Our hazard and vulnerability studies in the Pacific Northwest and southern California dramatically demonstrate the strong need for combining social and economic understanding with a multi-hazard approach to reduce community vulnerability. For the past 10 years, USGS has been building the foundations of an integrated approach to hazard risk, working with communities, multiple public and private agencies, and the social and economic sciences. In the recently published USGS Science Strategy and the new companion plan “Geology for a Changing World 2010-2020, an interdisciplinary science agenda is laid out calling for an increase in our scientific and public partnerships, multi-hazard research, improved monitoring and warning, integrated hazard and risk assessments, and communication products that provide hazard science information when and where it is needed and that support disaster resilience and risk-wise behavior.