We are reviewing significant disaster events, synthesizing and analyzing loss data, exploring data on expenditures for mitigation, pointing out data gaps to fill for a national baseline needed to track change, and updating the disaster scenarios posed in the 1975 assessment. We are addressing the reasons for increased susceptibility, e.g., population and climate change, globalization of economic and social systems, and others. We are also reviewing the last 20 years to trace the evolution of hazards policy, institutional, and organizational arrangements. Subgroups will also create a research agenda for the future, and estimate the applicability of each mitigation to foster long-term sustainability in terms of resiliency from disaster losses, maintaining a local economy and ecosystem, and so on. Eventually, these mitigation-specific integrations will themselves be integrated to create integrated mitigation management as a tool useful for local decision making.
Subgroups are now in different stages of development and work.
The Future We are currently cataloguing and evaluating new tools and approache that have emerged over the last 20 years and estimating their place in the future, for example, risk analysis, computer-assisted decision information systems, and many others. We will eventually bring all research recommendations together into a catalogue of needed future research. We will also develop a vehicle for measuring and defining local acceptable risk, and we will investigate and make recommendations about how to interest and then involve local stakeholders in using integrated mitigation management based on those local definitions.