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Risk, Resilience, and Society: Understanding Societal Risk Perceptions and Expectations of the Built Environment

When we try to define what it means to be resilient, and to support the recovery of services, shelter, and businesses after a hazard event, many unique considerations arise. What do we know now? What can we technically accomplish? What do we have funding for? And, perhaps most important, who needs what, and when?

Drs. Katherine Johnson and Shannon Abeling will share outcomes from recent projects to contextualize and explore key issues around community resilience research and policy. Their presentations will cover societal perceptions of risk and decision-making processes, the influence of the wants of particular parties over the needs of society, and the expectations of the built environment in future hazards versus the desire for enhanced performance.

Katherine J. Johnson (Jo) is a Social Scientist at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST). Trained as an Applied Environmental Anthropologist, Jo is inspired to tackle complex problems which span the human, natural, and built environments. Her focus is to promote reduction of risk from natural hazards through emerging areas of research and collaboration from her home base within NIST’s Engineering Laboratory.

Shannon Abeling is a Research Fellow at the University of Auckland, where she completed a PhD in Civil Engineering in 2021. Her current research explores societal expectations for the seismic performance of buildings to inform future building code and standard updates. She is involved with the Resilient Buildings Project, a New Zealand Society of Earthquake Engineering (NZSEE) led and Earthquake Commission (EQC) funded initiative, and is also a collaborative researcher with QuakeCoRE IP1: Functional Recovery with Repairable Multi-Storey Buildings

Jul 27, 2022 01:00 PM in Pacific Time (US and Canada)