June 30, 2000 -- LAXENBURG, Austria -- The European Commission will sponsor the second EuroConference on Global Change and Catastrophe Risk Management focusing on earthquake risks in Europe, from July 6-9 at the International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis (IIASA). The first EuroConference was held at IIASA in June 1999 and concentrated on flood risks in Europe. One hundred experts from 25 countries in the risk management, insurance or natural disaster fields will address questions such as, "What are the global or regional consequences of future earthquakes?" "Can a major earthquake trigger global financial collapse?" "What are the social issues of loss-sharing?"
Case studies on earthquakes in Kobe, Izmit and Northridge will also be featured. Speakers, including those representing the World Bank, Swiss and Munich Reinsurance Companies, Council of Europe's Major Hazards Agreement, National Observatory of Athens, and the European Commission's Joint Research Center, will concentrate on the following areas:
- increasing vulnerability to earthquakes in Europe and throughout the world
- risk management, such as loss mitigation and modeling
- long-term economic and social effects of earthquakes
- financial management, such as risk transfer and loss sharing
The final day of the conference (July 9) is devoted to presentations on the conference topics by students and young scientists. These scientists will be recruited as part of the European Commission's Training and Mobility of Researchers (TMR) Program, from IIASA's Young Scientists Summer Program (YSSP), and from the Disaster Prevention Institute of Kyoto University.
The conference is coordinated by IIASA's Risk, Modeling and Society (RMS) Project. For further information on the Project or on the Global Change and Catastrophe Risk Management Conference, please visit IIASA's web site at http://www.iiasa.ac.at/Research/RMP/july2000.
The International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis (IIASA), located in Laxenburg, Austria, is an independent, non-governmental, interdisciplinary research institution that specializes in natural and social scientific research methods and models valued by policy makers, the scientific community and the public worldwide. IIASA is an international institution, with sponsoring member organizations in 15 countries.