The Second European Conference on Earthquake Engineering and Seismology (2ECEES) in Istanbul, Turkey from 24-29 August, 2014 is a joint event of European Association of Earthquake Engineering (EAEE) and European Seismological Commission (ESC). This year’s conference will feature 50 keynote and theme experts and about 750 oral and 800 poster presentations on Earthquake Engineering and Seismology along with priority issues of global importance.

Omar Cardona, IRDR Science Committee Member, is one of the invited presenters. He will speak on “Probabilistic and Spectral Seismic Hazard and Risk Analysis at Global Level for the 2015 Global Assessment Report on Disaster Risk Reduction.” His presentations in the conference are with other authors involved with CAPRA (Comprehensive Approach to Probabilistic Risk Assessment), an open source, open architecture platform for evaluation of multi-hazard risk.

Omar Dario Cardona is the Director of IRDR ICoE in Understanding Risk & Safety (IRDR ICoE-UR&S) with the home institution located at the Disaster Risk Management Task Force, Institute of Environmental Studies (Instituto de Estudios Ambientales – IDEA), National University of Colombia (Universidad Nacional de Colombia) in Manizales City, Colombia. In 2004, he was awarded the UN Sasakawa Disaster Prevention Prize “in recognition of his outstanding research contributions to knowledge and innovative practices for vulnerability assessment and disaster risk reduction worldwide”.

Summarizing his key objectives with his current studies he said: “Risk assessment is key to creating awareness and is a great concern to decision makers since it impacts their responsibilities. To understand the current reality means identifying the drivers of vulnerability and lack of resilience. It also means considering the implicit and unavoidable trade-offs regarding transformation of development.”

This conference will be an opportunity to explain the innovation on approaches for probabilistic and holistic risk evaluation and what a “good-enough” risk assessment is, which is the key for an effective disaster risk management.

He believes that it is necessary to explore how probabilistic risk models and holistic models can be integrated in an effort to develop methodologies that can provide the true benefits of aggregation and disaggregation of hard and soft risk drivers to identify the corrective and prospective interventions to be done.

To know more about the 2ECEES Conference, check http://www.2eceesistanbul.org/?page=homepage.