Science for Humanitarian Emergencies and Resilience
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Science for Humanitarian Emergencies and Resilience (SHEAR) was an interdisciplinary, international research programme jointly funded for by the UK's Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office (FCDO) and the Natural Environmental Research Council (NERC) from 2016 – 2022. SHEAR involved unique interdisciplinary collaboration among researchers and humanitarians that looked at ways to improve our understanding of climate-related risks as well as forecasts and early warning systems, in parallel with enhancing humanitarian actions to reduce this risk. SHEAR projects made advances in a number of key areas:
Understanding hazard risk, examining a range of hazards, including landslides, droughts, floods, heatwaves, and storms, and worked to monitor and analyse the conditions under which they occur, how they develop, their drivers, characteristics, and inputs
Developing early warning for fast and slow-onset hazards including floods, landslide and droughts, and exploring key aspects of governance and communication of early warning as well as monitoring and detecting hazard events. Research has included innovative applications of technologies from satellite observations to social media, and has assessed different approaches to early warning to understand their effectiveness and applicability for different hazards and contexts.
Developing early action, coordinating the planning and implementation of humanitarian preparedness, response, and recovery also requires navigating different roles and responsibilities, mandates, and capacities. SHEAR projects have been working to support decision-makers by addressing these challenges in relation to a range of hazards, developing effective communication to support stakeholders with the information they need, when they need it, to inform effective disaster preparedness, response, and recovery.
Monitoring, modelling, and forecasting, carrying out innovative research to address the key challenges of forecasting for humanitarian emergencies and resilience, working in partnership with stakeholders in government and civil society to strengthen preparedness and contingency planning.
Interdisciplinary collaboration, combining expertise from physical sciences, social sciences, disaster risk management practice and governance, and financing and insurance to deliver multi-faceted, holistic approaches to key challenges of disaster risk and resilience.
User-centred communication, exploring key ways to communicate risk with the stakeholders, with a focus on visualisation as a way to illustrate complex information in ways that support decision-making.
Governance and policy, generating extensive learning about putting research into practice, and ensuring that stakeholder needs are at the centre of disaster risk management governance and policy.
Although SHEAR has come to a close, all of the learning and research outcomes will continue to be available to the disaster resilience community:
The SHEAR website will remain as a landing page to provide key information about all of the projects, and links to resources.
The SHEAR Resources Directory is up to date and provides an overview and links to a range of resources developed throughout the programme to synthesise emerging findings, learning, and experience from SHEAR across different areas relating to early warning and early action, and to the implementation of interdisciplinary research.
The Sendai Framework Voluntary Commitments (SFVC) online platform allows stakeholders to inform the public about their work on DRR. The SFVC online platform is a useful toolto know who is doing what and where for the implementation of the Sendai Framework, which could foster potential collaboration among stakeholders. All stakeholders (private sector, civil society organizations, academia, media, local governments, etc.) working on DRR can submit their commitments and report on their progress and deliverables.