Not long ago, disasters were mainly seen by people as ‘Acts of God’, as divine punishment to humankind for their evil ways. The first historical shift came with the advent of Enlightenment, rationality, and modern scientific thinking in the eighteenth century. Disasters and risk were seen as ‘Acts of Nature’, and since then, natural extreme events such as earthquakes, tsunamis, and floods were synonymous with disasters. The second and last historical shift is brought forth by social sciences and the idea of disasters as ‘social constructions’. Today, geographers and other scholars have referred to disasters as ‘Acts of Men and Women’ to interpret disasters as results of conflicting socio-economic, political, and cultural processes which, when translated into vulnerability, are ‘triggered’ by a given natural extreme event. This interpretation or approach is the very starting point of this session that deals with the integration of different forms of knowledge, practices, actors, and cultures in the field of disaster risk management, that is, the application of disaster risk reduction policies and strategies to prevent new disaster risk, reduce existing disaster risk and manage residual risk, contributing to the strengthening of resilience and reduction of disaster losses.
As far as we know, the idea of an integrated disaster risk management (IDRM) has been around for at least three decades. Starting from the 1990s, conversations on integration and disaster risk management have intertwined with concepts such as sustainability and climate change. Nevertheless, conceptualising and rendering IDRM in practical cases have been elusive, in part because it has never taken a central place in the development and disaster discourses and in part because ‘integration’ tends to mean a lot of things to a lot of people.
In this session we invite geographers and other researchers who are working at the interface of and from environmental and social sciences to submit their works –empirical or theoretical– on topics related to:

Integration of disaster risk management actors: e.g., civil society, academia and research institutions, public and private sectors, among others.
Physical and human/social research on hazards and risks, with focus on integration of different forms of knowledge and practices
Resilience research at different or multiple scales: from local to global
Studies and cases at different or integrated phases of disaster risk management: response, recovery, reconstruction, prevention, preparedness, and transformation.
Integration on civil protection, rescue engineering, and critical infrastructure

Vicente Sandoval (1); Verena Flörchinger (1); Peter Priesmeier (2)
(1) Disaster Research Unit, Freie Universität Berlin, Germany, (2) Institute of Rescue Engineering and Civil Protection, the Cologne University of Applied Sciences (TH-Köln), Germany

 
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