Research

IRDR's research focuses on quantifying and reducing the risk of natural, technological, socio-economic and intentional disasters. These areas of great concern to humanity are monitored and evaluated as their impact is increasing due to climate change, population growth and globalisation.

Research themes

Research in the department centres around three guiding themes:

What causes risk and disaster?

Investigating the science, socioeconomics, and politics behind hazards, vulnerabilities, risks, and disasters, through measurement and modelling using multidisciplinary approaches ranging from anthropological to digital technologies.

Primary data collection from the natural environment (earth, air and water)
Primary data collection from social, economic, cultural, and political environments
Construction characteristics and damage and loss metrics of housing and infrastructure.
Modelling drivers of risk and disasters.

What are the consequences of risk and disasters?

Understanding individual and multi hazards, cascading effects, vulnerability and risk, their interactions and dynamics, and implications.

Use quantitative and qualitative data to assess loss, damage and wider impacts on people, sectors, communities, systems and the environment.
Investigate the implications for economic development in the long and short terms.
Analyse how risk and disaster are experienced differently based on a range of factors including socio-economic, demographic, governance, and historical, and pre-existing inequalities.

Catalysing change

Innovative interdisciplinary application of techniques to improve disaster risk reduction, resilience, and humanitarian response management.

Disaster risk management
Supporting planning and anticipatory action
Communicating risk
Collaborative thinking and ideas
Educating future leaders

Research areas

Climate change and adaptation

Understanding climate change associated risks, especially for poor and those marginalised, and adaptation through capacity building, developing institutions and incentive structures.

Conflict and migration

Investigating conflicts and their consequences, the forces behind displacement, (im)mobility, wider human rights and humanitarian concerns.

nurse with gloves on holding an elderly lady's hand

Health and social risks

Understanding, tracking, and communicating health and social risks through interdisciplinary methods and digital tools.

Inclusion and politics

Developing awareness of, and responsiveness to gender and intersectionality considerations, other aspects of inclusion, and wider politics in the contexts of risks, vulnerabilities and disasters.

Rubble from destroyed busilings falling down the bank of a river into the flood water

Natural hazards and risks

Understanding geological and meterological hazards, multi-hazards, and developing ways to mitigate disaster. Risk and uncertainty quantification and communication.

Buildings on the banks of a shallow river

Warning, resilience and finance

Planning for, and managing hazards, vulnerabilities, risks and disasters through warning systems, analysis of resilience, disaster risk finance, micro-finance and catastrophe modelling.

People milling around in an exhibition hall

Educating leaders

Prize-winning student dissertations and research focusing on future leaders and influencers in the humanitarian and disaster risk reduction sphere.

Collaborators

Research projects

Please see the themes above for details of current projects, or view a full list of ongoing and completed research projects undertaken in the Institute for Risk and Disaster Reduction.

Our researchers

All academic staff in the department undertake research, and we welcome visiting researchers from around the globe.

Find out more about the research experts in the IRDR on our People page and see their full bios on UCL Profiles.

Contact us

Please get in touch if you have any questions about our research or would like to collaborate.

Email: irdr-enquiries@ucl.ac.uk