UNESCO Chair in DRR-RE Celebrates Four Years of Global Impact and Sets Ambitious Goals for 2025–2029

The UNESCO Chair in DRR-RE, led by Prof. Dina D’Ayala, reflects on four years of global impact and unveils its 2025–2029 strategy, announcing major AI initiatives, expanded collaborations, and the appointment of Prof. Yasemin Aktas as Co-Chair.

Over the past four years, the UNESCO Chair in Disaster Risk Reduction and Resilience Engineering (DRR-RE), led by Prof. Dina D’Ayala, has made significant progress in advancing global knowledge and collaboration on resilience engineering. Since April 2022, the Chair has hosted a highly successful webinar series and built a vibrant community of practice, delivering 35 webinars and courses and connecting more than 3,500 researchers and practitioners from over 100 countries. It also implemented the Development of an AI-based Procedure for the Minimizing Education Disruption Following Natural Hazards project in the Dominican Republic, funded by UNESCO Disaster Risk Reduction Unit under the BERLAC initiative, and hosted the virtual Confined Masonry Symposium, which attracted over 300 participants and featured 20 invited speakers from 14 countries. Collaborating with the University of Glasgow, Xavier University Philippines, and National University of Singapore, we also delivered a week-long in-person training and stakeholder engagement forum at Xavier University - Ateneo de Cagayan, to foster the development of affordable and accessible decision-support tools to empower local communities in developing countries.

For the new period, the Chair is delighted to announce the appointment of Prof. Yasemin Aktas as Co-Chair for the upcoming term. In addition, Prof. Cassidy Johnson, from the Bartlett Urban Development Unit, will join the team, further enhancing its interdisciplinarity and capacity to drive meaningful impact. The Chair will also continue to examine the cultural factors that enable countries to build safe and resilient infrastructure and how these can be translated into concrete action.

Looking ahead, the UNESCO Chair in DRR-RE will focus its 2025–2029 program on a set of ambitious objectives. These include using Artificial Intelligence (AI) to better characterize educational infrastructure resilience and developing scalable data collection strategies. The Chair will also explore how AI can support decision-making for policymakers to improve infrastructure resilience to natural hazards, and work on integrating education and social infrastructure into broader community resilience efforts. Other priorities include investigating the links between school conditions, extreme weather, and adolescents’ mental health—piloting interventions to reduce the impact of heatwaves—as well as developing a framework to maximize public health benefits during disaster recovery, drawing lessons from the 2023 Türkiye Earthquakes. The program will also launch a new season of its acclaimed webinar series for the upcoming academic year.

Below you can find additional pictures from previous activities of the Chair.

 

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