Post-Katrina changes at the Federal Emergency Management Agency and the impacts of climate change will be discussed by an international gathering of experts July 12-15 at the annual workshop of the University of Colorado at Boulder's Natural Hazards Center.
The center's 33rd annual workshop will address the best ways to deal with extreme events such as floods, wildfires and earthquakes and will be attended by about 400 people. The event at the Omni Hotel in Broomfield is not open to the public.
The workshop will open with a keynote address by Roger Pielke Jr., a professor in the CU-Boulder Environmental Studies Program and a fellow of the Cooperative Institute for Research in Environmental Sciences. His presentation, "The Hazards Ahead," from 9:15 a.m. to 10 a.m. on Sunday, July 14, will focus on the challenges facing hazards scholars seeking to play a greater role in the climate issue in the highly public, emotional and political debate about what to do about climate change.
Pielke will be followed by a panel of International Panel on Climate Change, or IPCC, scientists who shared in the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize and who will discuss the implications of climate change for societies around the world.
The workshop's second keynote speaker, Gerald Galloway, a former brigadier general with the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, recently received attention on the front page of The New York Times in connection with the flooding Mississippi River. Galloway headed a national commission issuing recommendations on what to do following the last severe flooding of the Mississippi in 1993.
Galloway contends the commission's recommendations could have lessened damage from this year's flooding if they had been implemented. He will speak from 9:15 a.m. to 10 a.m. on Monday, June 14.
A discussion on the role of the media in disasters will include panelists from National Public Radio's "All Things Considered," Time magazine and the New Orleans Times-Picayune from 1:30 p.m. to 3 p.m. on Monday.
A representative of Grand Bayou United, an organization of Native American fishing families affected by Hurricane Katrina, will participate in a discussion of community-based organizations. A leading U. S. scholar on environment-society relationships, William Freudenburg of the University of California, Santa Barbara will provide an analysis of the ways in which Hurricane Katrina was not a "natural" disaster.
Other sessions will discuss peer-to-peer disaster communication, early warning systems and how emergency management might be affected by the 2008 U.S. presidential election.
Also at the workshop, Natural Hazards Center Director Kathleen Tierney will sign an agreement with representatives from Japan's Kyoto University providing for cooperation in disaster reduction research.
The Natural Hazards Center, part of CU-Boulder's Institute of Behavioral Science, is funded by a consortium of agencies including the National Science Foundation and FEMA. For more information, visit the center's Web site at .