UCL RDR monthly event: The future of disasters

In the present-day world, the pursuit of disaster risk reduction (DRR) involves some exceptional challenges. Climate change, emerging risks, instability, mass migration, and the intersection of disasters and conflict are some of the drivers of change that can be sudden, profound and highly disruptive. As we live in networked societies, with an increasingly high dependency on critical infrastructure, modern disasters are to a greater or lesser degree cascading events. Hence, to understand and react to the threat and impact of disaster we need to pay particular attention to three things: complexity, context and foresight. 

David Alexander is the retiring Professor of Emergency Planning and Management at UCL Risk & Disaster Reduction. During his career spanning over 45 years of disasters research, education and advisory, he has held appointments at five universities in the UK, two in the USA, three in Italy, three in Japan where he is currently a cross appointment professor at Tohoku University, and one each in Portugal, Sweden, Fiji and Switzerland.  

David has approximately 480 publications to his name, including 13 books with works translated into French, Italian, German, Portuguese, Japanese, Russian and Arabic. His books include ‘Natural disasters’, ‘Confronting catastrophe’, ‘Principles of emergency planning and management’, ‘Recovery from disaster’ (co-authored with Ian Davis) and ‘How to write an emergency plan’.  

He is the founding editor of the International Journal of Disaster Risk Reduction, editing roughly 17,000 papers during his career. David is Vice-President and Chair of the Trustees of the Institute of Civil Protection and Emergency Management, the oldest learned society in its field (founded in 1938). He has worked for the Home Office, Government Office for Science, Cabinet Office and the Council of Europe, and acted as Specialist Adviser to the House of Lords Select Committee on Risk Assessment and Risk Planning in 2021. He is currently advising governments in Scotland, Ireland, France, Japan and “a Middle Eastern country”. He is a member of the Advisory Board of the UK Alliance for Disaster Research, the Board of Directors of the International Society for Integrated Disaster Risk Management, and Global Advisory Council Member, Institute for Strategic Risk Management. 

David received the Santa Barbara medal of the Italian Volunteer Fire Service and the Distinguished Research Award of the International Society for Integrated Disaster Risk Management (IDRiM) in 2009 and 2013 respectively.