Forensic (Interdisciplinary) Analysis of Volcanic Risk
Understanding how natural hazards become disasters is extremely complex. One way to uncover the underlying drivers behind a disaster is to combine spatial and temporal analysis of the physical processes that trigger the hazardous event with their evolving impacts and their dynamic interaction with pre-existing social and physical vulnerabilities.
STREVA has taken this interdisciplinary retrospective (‘forensic’) approach to several volcanic eruptions. The aim was to use our new understanding of the drivers to risk to improve how it might be characterised, analysed and monitored across differing volcanic settings to strengthen resilience to future eruptions.
Two long-term eruptions (Soufriere Hills [Montserrat] and Tungurahua [Ecuador]) were analysed and our forensic methodology was tailored to two active volcanic settings with more transitory activity (La Soufriere [St Vincent], Nevado del Ruiz [Colombia], Cotopaxi [Ecuador], and latterly Sabancaya [Peru]). The focus of our interdisciplinary analyses was guided by initial ‘forensic’ workshops – intensive in-country evidence gathering exercises, set within a week of social capital-building activities. These were designed to bring together STREVA researchers with in-country scientists, local decision makers, emergency managers and citizens. Our settings usually had an existing comprehensive overview of past monitored activity but rather less information on the social impacts of that activity, and so much of our subsequent information gathering focused on those aspects.
In all settings, the eruption had exerted a strong influence on livelihood trajectories in the longer term, tending to exacerbate pre-existing inequalities. For the long-lived eruptions adaptations in risk management have enabled local populations to live in relatively close proximity to volcanic activity with rapid short-term responses to renewed or increased activity. . The success and effectiveness of communication processes is a key feature in adaptation and recovery across all settings.
In summary, our forensic approach has helped not only to determine causality of disasters from a single eruptive event, but also understand the dynamics of different phases of eruptions, their impacts and adaptations to volcanic hazards and risk over time.