The chair of the AIRDR Working Group Susan Cutter, Director of the IRDR International Centre of Excellence on Vulnerability and Resilience Metrics, announced the imminent release of three new AIRDR reports, commissioned by UNISDR as input to GAR15 expert meetings in 2014.

The reports are seen to refer in particular to the section of the 2015 Global Assessment Report on Disaster Risk Reduction (GAR15), that address the “Future of Disaster Risk Management”. They cover:

1. The identification of incentives that may constitute tipping points for behavioural change towards prospective disaster risk management and risk-sensitive choices at a significant scale (increasing the political, social and economic saliency of disaster risk management).
2. The notion of transformative development and the positive externalities it signifies for risk reduction, control and increased resilience.
3. The implications of the findings from the above two concerns for governance: structural institutional arrangements and agency within and between different social sectors.

These efforts had been underpinned by a thorough bibliometric analysis of English language peer-reviewed scientific journals published between 1999 and 2013, examining in addition 78 other English language publications from the period 1993 to 2011. At the time of reporting, the results of this assessment, “Integrated Research on Disaster Risk: Is it Really Integrated?” was under review by Elsevier’s International Journal of Disaster Risk Reduction, http://www.journals.elsevier.com/international-journal-of-disaster-risk-reduction/.

The methodological approach used has been documented in a Guide to Assessing the Integrated Research in Disaster Risk. While highlighting the limitations of covering solely English-language literature, the Guide was developed to facilitate a more inclusive review of integrated research on disaster risk. It is envisaged that similar systematic reviews of local and regional research contributions will be produced for other languages adding up, gradually, to a global synthesis. Initial expressions of interests to participate in the project have been received from institutions in Latin America, Japan and China.

AIRDR reviews conducted for UNISDR’s GAR15

AIRDR (Assessment of Integrated Research on Disaster Risk) is a 3‐year project designed to undertake the first systematic and critical global assessment of integrated research on disaster risk, generating in the process a review of the state‐of‐the‐art of integrated research approaches to disaster risk science. So far, the focus has been on literature and research from the English-speaking world, but currently efforts are under-way to include also other linguistic areas.