Prescription:

Based on the IUGS Bureau recommendation in 2014, and during the 68th IUGS-EC meeting at Vancouver, Canada, January 2015, Yujiro Ogawa (IUGS Councilor) announced that the Japanese National Committee for IUGS (within SCJ (the Science Council of Japan)) will organize and establish the task group within IUGS. This Task Group on Geohazards (hereafter TGG) will aim to work as an exchange group on a wider scale, primarily for societal works for basic understanding of geohazards and natural disasters (hazard is defined as a cause of disaster), including to enhance the governance processes, to do research by means of doing a wide range of education, and to support various ranges for society, and will pursue the inclusions of the topics of the so-called geohazards into finally prevention and mitigation of natural disasters, following the previous experiences that we have done in recent years. The TGG work should be finally for the impacts on the society from geological aspects and viewpoints. This based on full proposal (v.91a) is revised after the 69th IUGS EC meeting, Yunnan, China in January 2016, and Proposed for Approval at the 4thOrdinary Session of the IUGC-IGC Council Cape Town, 31 August – 01 September. This version of full proposal is for reference to the readers is a minor revision after the approval above; Sept. 19, 2016; by Y. Ogawa.

Scope, scientific rationale, objective, and output of the task group

In the past, the man in the world has experienced countless geohazards such as earthquake, tsunami, volcanic eruption, slope failure and abnormal climate, including flood and drought. These geohazards are of potential disasters, and are basically of geological phenomena. What the man has learnt from these experiences is that people, particularly decision makers including politicians, officers and teachers, should continuously learn advanced knowledge about geohazards, and should watch natural disasters happening in the world. The lesson could lead to building societies resilient enough or at least recoverable against the potential disasters, and to educating people for better behaviors by better instructions of decision makers.

A hazard itself is defined as a basic cause of any disasters, but geohazards are primarily related with the geological phenomena that may cause severe disasters resulting in the loss of lives, the damage to the industry and production, and in long-lasting negative societal effects, and related minus results. Consequentially the geohazards may include many varieties of phenomena, in addition to pure geological, also technological (or engineering), human/societal, and sometimes also political phenomena. We keep in mind that our task group’s works must influence such applicable roles in the society.

In this context, what we, our geological scientists, should do is to study geohazards and reduction of natural disaster by integrating geoscience, engineering and social science. The effective way is to establish a network of organizations relevant to geohazards and natural disasters in the world for integration of knowledge and to disseminate the integrated knowledge to the society through research and education. We aim to establish three categories of works that are; 1) To organize international collaboration teams within a network system that promote exchange the information, hold various sessions, workshops and symposiums in international conferences (e.g. JpGU, CGU, EGU, AGU, GSA etc.), 2) To publish a series of global geohazard maps by compiling natural hazards in various parts of divisions such as earthquake and active fault, tsunami, volcanic eruption, slope failure, flood and abnormal climate and so on, and to publicize the results by presenting the global geohazard maps for world stakeholders that include the decision makers, officers, teachers and citizens, 3) To enhance capacity building cooperation roles that disseminate what we have learnt on geohzards by providing a practical system for advanced education (MSc and PhD) on geohazards in a wide, world scope in universities and institutes.