Talk: Why disaster risk reduction and climate change needs you! Disasters are the result of the nexus between human populations and natural hazards for the most part. It is important that disaster risk, which can be extended to climate change are recognised, understood and most importantly, acted upon. The first half of this presentation will take you a journey through tectonic landscapes that often scream warnings to us, but are ignored. The reasons for this are rooted in how we perceive and understand threats, risk and response, including whose responsibility it is to respond. We will look at the way in which human beings live with risk and in some cases exacerbate it before exploring how individuals, not scientists, corporations or governments have the greatest potential to limit these risks and carry out their own protective measures. My research explores the extent to which Transformative Learning practices may help us confront our fears, sense of helplessness and stasis in the face of such threats, providing a practical and achievable ways forward. The second half of the talk will explore these ideas as well as showing how they work in practice, giving some examples from my fieldwork in a community in Santa Barbara, California.

2. Why disaster risk reduction and climate
change needs you!
And why learning rather
than education is key:
Telling people it might be
dangerous isn't enough!
Exploring the role of
transformative learning in
enabling individuals, groups and
collectives to become adaptable
and resilient to disaster threats.
What I will talk about?
Tectonic hazards produce some amazingly
beautiful landscapes and provide economic
opportunity from these landscapes. I will
take you on a tectonic journey, showing you
some obvious, some not so obvious
hazards, as well as some of the crazy ways
people live alongside these, in places you
may well have visited.
Justin Sharpe, PhD Candidate, Department of Geography, King’s College London

3. I LOVE volcanoes! So whenever I can I visit them and
photograph them and the features they create.
Tectonic landscapes provide natural beauty, resources but also have a dark
side…

4. Italy has long lived with seismically induced dangers such
as earthquakes, volcanic eruptions and tsunamis.
Mount
Vesuvius
 Volcanic Tourism is a
big part of the economy
around the Bay of
Naples

5. This is an active caldera, to
the west of Naples and past
tectonic movements have
buried and sunk the crater
edges to the south that lie
under the sea. One million
people now live in the crater,
with six million in the ‘blast
zone’!

6. And yet we have long known that the area is tectonically active?

7. Temple of Serapis
The dark marks on the columns of this temple are caused by organisms
that burrow into the rock (a clam called lithodomus which means 'living in
rock'). This species only lives under the sea and Charles Lyell (a King's
College London professor of geology) correctly surmised that at one point
they had been submerged. Drawings of which appeared on the cover of his

8. Campi Flegrei - ...
These apartment
blocks are on the
edge of the current
volcanic crater…
And our response as human beings? Let’s build on an crater rim!

9. And it is not only Italy where people live with
the threat of tectonic hazards...Let’s go to
California
And to northern California...just outside of San Francisco...to
UC Berkley

10. This is row ‘KK’ of the football stadium, if you
look closely you can see where the stadium is
being slowly pulled apart by the Hayward fault.
This fault can move suddenly generating
earthquakes, but it is known to ‘creep’. Note the
mitigation method of a bit of metal over the
concrete and the offset stand!

11. Part Two: Where do you come into
the equation?

12. Part Two: Where do you come into the equation?

15. My approach:

16. So how can we reframe our response to help individuals do something about it?
1. Local threats, local actions:
In parts of California and beyond local populations have created CERT Community
Emergency Response Teams.
In Santa Barbara I witnessed some of these teams at the end of their training taking part in their final
'exam' - A VERY realistic drill. As part of my PhD fieldwork I carried out narrative inquiry interviews and
semi structured interviews. These photographs show the training and also the sum of their knowledge
tested via a realistic exercise.

17. CERT Training exercise:

18. I was able to share findings represented in this working framework

21. English
Fijian
Farsi

22. This led to the development of an iBook: Silly Timmy's disaster comic for
children with built in interactivity. The comic strip was piloted in an
educational setting in a kindergarten school in Iran (a big challenge) and a
corresponding paper - Use of comic strips in teaching earthquakes to
kindergarten children (Sharpe and Izadkhah, 2014)
So education, outreach and
research also have a role to play in
diplomacy with nations that otherwise
have fractious relations with the UK.

23. Thank you. Any questions?
Justin Sharpe,
King's Centre for Integrated Research on Risk and Resilience
Department of Geography, King's College London.
justin.sharpe@kcl.ac.uk