The Risks (iRiMa) programme: structuring and reinforcing the science of risk prevention and management in France

Current global changes, whether climatic, societal or technological, are creating new threats to human societies. These threats and the ways of dealing with them are the subject of much reflection and sometimes heated debate around the issues of the vulnerability of populations and infrastructures, and the resilience and adaptation of societies. One of the major challenges, involving several scientific and political considerations, concerns the capacity of societies as a whole, and of the most vulnerable groups or regions, to cope with risks and disasters, in particular to have the capacity and resources to:

• prevent, prepare for and protect against risks,
• to absorb, mitigate and adapt to them,
• and to restore, recover, and transform themselves.

Addressing the issues requires tackling complex challenges by adopting a range of research perspectives and developing new methodologies and innovative tools. Drawing heavily on the humanities and social sciences, Goal 1 aims to foster collaboration between researchers in different disciplines and fields, to map and analyse the current frameworks of knowledge production, policies and practices of risk and disaster management, in order to contribute to the development of new concepts and cross-cutting approaches.

• Challenge 1. Analyse risk and disaster research and management frameworks (concepts, approaches, methods and practices) and their social and political effects, from a cross-cutting, diachronic, multi-scale and multi-actor perspective, in order to contribute to their improvement or transformation
• Challenge 2. Contribute to the structuring of a multidisciplinary and multi-sectoral research community in risk and disaster sciences.
• Challenge 3. Develop new, more integrated and inclusive risk policies for a more robust and resilient society.

This methodological goal concerns the continuum from observation, modelling, cascading effects and risk metrics to decision making. Supported by Goal 1, it provides high-level expertise in mathematics and engineering to help risk researchers develop an increasingly global strategy and meet the needs of decision-makers to consider integrated variables, criteria and operational indicators that are capable of dealing with climate constraints and socio-environmental changes. Data mining for risk assessment, and the design of both relevant quantitative risk measures and decision support algorithms are still very difficult as they require dealing with data that are multifactorial, interdependent (including human behaviour) and large and heterogeneous (qualitative and quantitative, weak signal) in a dynamic way, at different spatial and temporal scales, while taking into account potentially strong non-stationarities. This goal will focus on the design of innovative algorithms that will be used to provide new quantitative models to be used for Goal 1 and the other goals (3, 4 & 5).

• Challenge 1. Control data quality and model reduction: heterogeneous data, models and corresponding spatial metrics involving applied mathematics, digital science and technology, engineering, quantitative social science and environmental science.
• Challenge 2. Improve multi-scale and multi-physics modelling, including social and economic issues, specifically adapted to the great diversity of spatial (from local to global) and temporal (from past to future taking into account global change) scales, and cascading effects.
• Challenge 3. Measure the multi-dimensional risk for decision-making by improving the consideration of interdependencies between infrastructures, cascading effects, and concurrent events in risk assessment methodologies. Consider the complete data-model-expertise-decision chain.

This goal covers all the physical and social processes aimed at better understanding, predicting and mitigating risks in mountain and coastal areas, from the characterisation of natural risks and underlying phenomena to decision-making and societal adaptation in the face of current and future climate and societal changes. Indeed, mountain and coastal areas have much in common. Physically, these are areas of strong constraints and extreme conditions (steep slopes, thaw-freeze cycles, storm surges, intense precipitation), that are sensitive to severe meteorological and/or oceanic forcing, which make them among the most difficult environments to access and observe. They also show similar sensitivity to climate change, as recognised in the recent IPCC report. Socially, they share a strong attraction for tourism and permanent human settlements. This generates a high demand for real estate and, more broadly, increases vulnerability (including for critical infrastructure such as ports, power plants, ski resorts, ecosystems, etc.), that are often exacerbated by social inequalities in the face of risk. 

• Challenge 1. Improve knowledge of physical and social processes to better assess risks, develop new multidisciplinary data acquisition strategies, better understand and quantify socio-historical processes, and integrate these advances into a detailed risk assessment.
• Challenge 2. Refine socio-economic trajectories in the context of rapid global change through a better understanding of the particularities induced by the rapid evolution of mountain and coastal risks at different time scales in all their components (hazard, exposure to vulnerability, etc.).
• Challenge 3. Better comprehend the coupling of coastal processes to the land-ocean continuum by including the full range of coastal hydro-sedimentary processes and formal water-air and water-sediment interactions in the range of open and semi-closed ecosystems.

This goal addresses, in an interdisciplinary and integrated way, the scientific issues raised by crises occurring in (peri-)urban and/or industrialised areas for which several vulnerabilities are combined. A crisis is understood here as a process that links different phases: the preparation/planning period, the emergency phase dealing with real-time crisis management and mitigation of short-term effects, and finally the long-term remediation/resilience phase. Particular attention will be paid to systemic risks with different kinetics, cascading or combined risks (e.g., the earthquake and tsunami in Japan that led to the Fukushima disaster) and emerging threats related to climate change (e.g., mega-fires, extreme weather events, extreme floods, see Goals 1 & 2) and anthropogenic activities (flash floods, seismicity induced by geothermal projects/drilling, flash floods, biological hazards).

• Challenge 1. Evaluate and integrate uncertainties at all stages of risk assessment and crisis management, including their communication to the different stakeholders and taking into account the specificities and constraints of the industrial/urban/densely populated environment (from Goals 1 & 2).
• Challenge 2. Decipher the physical and social processes and precursors related to crises at very fine urban spatial and temporal scales, and their interactions with broader spatial and temporal scales.
• Challenge 3. Improve data collection and documentation of real-time events using a variety of sources, including environmental observations, video, images and information shared on social networks.

Goal 5 deals with the intense and frequent telluric and hydro-meteorological hazards faced by the populations of France's overseas regions and inter-tropical zones: earthquakes, volcanic eruptions, tsunamis, gravity-related instabilities, floods/coastal flooding, slope/coastal erosion (see Goals 3 & 4) in connection with hurricanes and climate change. Overseas and intertropical areas have a range of geographical and societal particularities, which call for an in-depth understanding of local capacities for risk prevention and management as well as resilience: distance from mainland France, insularity, remoteness and size of the regions, diversity of cultural and historical practices, social and political tensions (e.g., the current situation in Guadeloupe and Martinique). Innovative management strategies must therefore be developed and tested in terms of feasibility/acceptability/inclusiveness, while taking into account the political and social status of these regions. Deepening our knowledge of telluric and hydro-meteorological hazards as well as the vulnerabilities of these regions is of interest both for the regions directly and for mainland France, because of the active fields of observation they offer.

• Challenge 1. Identify new observables to study natural hazards and related anthropogenic impact at large spatio-temporal scales (e.g., long seismic and volcanic cycles and the cyclical nature of hurricanes).
• Challenge 2. Develop holistic and integrated models of complex processes taking into account uncertainties in climate-change projections, integration of coupled predictive models.
• Challenge 3. Develop integrative risk management strategies adapted to overseas and inter-tropical areas, and capable of dealing with the consequences of extreme episodes and cascading events leading to multiple risks (eruptions, landslides, tsunamis, floods, etc.).

Risk assessment requires a dedicated infrastructure of platforms to capture the complexity, bring together the full range of expertise needed and enable cross-fertilisation and the sharing of knowledge with a wide audience. Goal 6 will provide mapping and analysis capabilities through digital twin approaches in order to build dynamic scenarios to support crisis management or to foster sharing of knowledge. This will include i) promoting the co-construction of initiatives involving the academic world, operational organisations and citizens, to better understand the behaviour of social and economic agents in the face of risk, ii) integrating multi-hazard mapping tools into a coherent digital repository to improve the management of the impact of complex hazards; iii) taking into account gradual and abrupt changes in hazards and socio-economic/socio-environmental conditions, iv) providing tools to analyse risk perception mechanisms that affect the behaviour of individuals before and during an event, and the acceptability of public policies; and v) proposing an integration of high-performance computing (HPC) numerical-modelling capabilities and shared development environments (GitLab).

• Challenge 1. Formalise a numerical modelling infrastructure based on existing French research facilities dedicated to massive data analysis and numerical HPC to model the physical processes involved in natural, technological or environmental disasters.
• Challenge 2. Develop integrated multi-hazard mapping platforms dedicated to the production of hazard, vulnerability and risk maps for decision making.
• Challenge 3. Aggregate social and economic science methods in a common web-based co-working tool to share all social information processing/management.

By integrating the different communities facing risks, the PEPR will contribute to a better organisation of research capacities at the national level, reinforced by the development of centres of excellence. These will be able to increase their influence at an international level on a range of risks (overseas coastal, mountain and telluric, technological, social). At the end of the programme, IRiMa will thus be able to act as a French research and management network for risks and disasters by:

• integrating communities that are currently dispersed,
• consolidating research and funding in this area,
• structuring a French research agenda.

IRiMa will contribute directly to the sustainable transformation of society in the face of risk (sustainability science), enhancing preparedness, crisis management and risk mitigation with a view to developing an integrated resilience framework in line with the UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs).

Bibliometric analyses show that France is currently ranked 9th in terms of the number of publications on all risk-oriented subjects for the period 2017 to 2021. France ranks 7th in Europe, after England, Italy, Austria and Spain. CNRS, IRD, INRAE and the UDICE Universities are the most productive: better coordination of their teams, as proposed by IRiMa, should place them in the top 5 in each of the risk-research themes.

By developing knowledge to support innovative methodologies and services in the field of monitoring, preparedness, crisis management and recovery, we are helping to amplify the international recognition of French know-how in this field. This must be a vehicle for boosting French expertise internationally.