Natural Hazards and Disaster Risk Reduction

Carina J. Fearnley is a lecturer in Environmental Hazards at the Institute of Geography and Earth Sciences, Aberystwyth University. She is an interdisciplinary researcher bringing together hazard science, disaster management, and science and technology studies to better understand natural hazard early warning systems, specifically volcano alert level systems. Recently, research interests have broadened to the application and analysis of science and art collaborations for natural hazards, as well as the role of geopolitics in making early warning systems effective.


Emily Wilkinson is a Research Fellow in the Climate Change, Environment and Forests Programme at the Overseas Development Institute. Her research focuses on policy and institutional dimensions of disaster risk management and climate change adaptation. Recently, she has been using a political economy lens to explore the constraints to collective action on risk management and is developing a line of research on the use of risk information in national and local-level policy-making.


Catherine J. Tillyard (nee Lowe) works in Catastrophe Management at the global reinsurance broker, Aon Benfield in London. Having completed a PhD in volcanic vulnerability and risk assessment, her role in the commercial sector centres on catastrophe risk management for the re/insurance industry. A key focus is to bring business and academia together to work on state-of-the-art research that has direct relevance to the re/insurance industry, in addition to investigating how the corporate sector can work more closely with NGOs on common problems around disaster risk reduction.


Stephen J. Edwards is an Earth Scientist at University College London, where he is the Deputy Director of the Aon Benfield UCL Hazard Centre in the Institute for Risk and Disaster Reduction. He specialises in the assessment and management of risk associated with natural hazards and natural resources, particularly volcanism and water. Stephen has over 25 years of research, teaching, training and knowledge exchange experience through his work at universities in the UK, Canada, Hong Kong and Papua New Guinea. He uses this experience to facilitate and sustain partnerships with the business, humanitarian and development sectors in order to assist them understand and reduce potential disaster and resource risk through greater engagement with the natural and environmental sciences.