This mouthful of a program was developed as part of the International Decade for Natural Disaster Reduction. Chu acts as a consultant to the program and is helping its director, Jeanne-Marie Col, to organize a workshop on earthquake management, which will be held this December in Beijing. The workshop will seek ways to improve the access of local officials in developing countries to information on earthquake hazards. Challenges on the home front Without the barriers to information transfer faced by developing countries, the United States has made great strides in earthquake preparedness, flood control, and volcano monitoring. But even here, the translation of scientific advances into improved public policy cannot be taken for granted.
Every success has a failure to match.
The challenge for the geoscience community is to educate public administrators on the value and benefits of geoscience information and natural hazards research. Instead of focusing only on cleaning up the mess after a disaster strikes, FEMA's mission now includes a strong emphasis on planning and preparedness. Geoscientists may view an improved understanding of the geologic environment and underlying processes as an obvious requirement for hazard mitigation. But strong input and involvement from the geoscience community is needed to ensure that FEMA and its state counterparts include improved scientific understanding in their mitigation efforts along with better building codes and emergency response planning. An amended version of the Stevens bill is sure to receive serious consideration in the next Congress regardless of which party is in control.