Natural Hazard Mitigation Association Practitioners Meeting
Workshop on Doing More with Less:
Mitigation in a Changing Environment
Tuesday, July 17 through Wednesday, July 18, 2012
Omni Interlocken Resort
Broomfield, Colorado
The NHMA Practitioners Meeting, a partnership between the Natural Hazard Mitigation Association and the Natural Hazards Center, follows the main Hazards Workshop. For more information on the NHMA, please visit the NHMA Web site.
Register for the NHMA Practitioners Meeting using the Natural Hazards Workshop online registration. An welcoming reception, continental breakfast, and lunch are included in the registration cost.
Program Theme
The theme of the 2012 Natural Hazard Mitigation Association Practitioners Meeting is “Doing More with Less: Mitigation in a Changing Environment.” This year’s theme highlights three central challenges that mitigation practitioners regularly confront while offering a myriad of mitigation success stories.
First, disaster losses are on the rise. Globally, the number of disasters has increased in the past three decades from about 120 per year in the 1980s to roughly 500 per year today. Developing countries endure the greatest loss of life—about 95 percent of all disaster deaths—when disaster strikes. In the United States, we have entered an era of repeated billion-dollar disasters that destroy natural and built environments and upend countless lives.
Second, these disaster losses have been exacerbated by a number of complex demographic, social, economic, and environmental changes that render more people vulnerable to disaster than ever before. Rising disaster losses are not simply the result of natural processes. These losses emerge from the concentration of infrastructure in hazard prone areas, weak planning and zoning requirements, population growth and urbanization, the rising number of poor living in risky locations, and a variety of other factors that place more vulnerable people and more property in harm’s way.
Third, in this time of enormous disaster losses, budgets for U.S. hazard mitigation programs have been significantly reduced at local, state, and federal levels. Thus, mitigation practitioners are being asked to do more with less when their expertise and skills are more necessary than ever before. In developing countries with exceptionally high hazard risk, mitigation programs may not exist at all.
The 2012 NHMA Practitioners Meeting will take a head-on approach to addressing these three challenges. But we’ll do more than talk about the current problems facing the hazard mitigation field. A central goal of this year’s meeting is to draw on the knowledge and expertise of all the mitigation practitioners from around the world who are doing more with less. At this meeting, there will be an exchange of ideas between policy experts, local mitigation champions, grassroots leaders, private sector professionals, and others who have dedicated their professional careers to reversing the tide of ever growing disaster loss. Please join us.
Schedule
This year’s meeting will include three plenary sessions and will offer three concurrent breakout tracks—for a total of six additional sessions—organized around the areas of (1) mitigation challenges; (2) mitigation needs; and (3) mitigation success stories. The key themes from this year’s meeting will be captured in a series of visual recordings.
A more detailed schedule is available on the NHMA Web site.
Tuesday, July 17
Centennial E
4:15 to 6:15 p.m.
Plenary
Interlocken D
6:00 to 7:00 p.m
Registration
Lobby Court and Terrace
6:15 to 7:30 p.m
Reception with IRCD Researchers Meeting
Wednesday, July 18
Centennial Foyer
7:30 to 10:00 a.m
Breakfast
Centennial E
7:45 to 8:15 a.m.
Breakfast Forum
Centennial Foyer
8:00 a.m. to 3:00 p.m.
Registration
Centennial E
8:30 to 10:00 a.m.
Plenary
10:00 to 10:15 a.m.
Break
Breakout Sessions
Alder
10:15 to 11:30 a.m.
Track 1: Mitigation Challenges
Centennial E
10:15 to 11:30 a.m.
Track 2: Mitigation Needs
Spruce
10:15 to 11:30 a.m.
Track 3: Mitigation Success Stories
Centennial E
11:30 a.m. to 12:00 p.m.
Visual Recorder Plenary Session: Breakout Groups Report Back
Outdoor Pavilion
12:00 to 1:00 p.m.
Lunch with IRCD Researchers Meeting
Centennial E
1:00 to 1:30 p.m.
Keynote
Breakout Sessions
Spruce
1:30 to 2:45 p.m.
Track 1: Mitigation Challenges
Alder
1:30 to 2:45 p.m.
Track 2: Mitigation Needs
Centennial E
1:30 to 2:45 p.m.
Track 3: Mitigation Success Stories
Centennial E
2:45 to 3:15 p.m.
Visual Recorder Plenary Session: Breakout Groups Report Back
3:15 to 3:30 p.m.
Break
Centennial E
3:30 to 5:00 p.m.
Plenary