Four Research Chairs to strengthen the cross-cutting activities of the IRiMa Risks Research Program

Scientific Coordination

• Christophe Bérenguer (Grenoble INP-UGA)
• Elena Di Bernardino (Université Côte d'Azur)
• Olivier Millet (Université de La Rochelle)

Context and objectives

The Data, models, and decision-making in risk science Chair aims to develop cross-cutting methodological capacity, as represented by Pillar 2 of the program. It will structure a continuum from observation to decision-making, through modeling, cascading effects analysis, and risk metrics.

This chair plays a pivotal role in developing cross-cutting approaches in the fundamental research that is characteristic of the IRiMa Risks Research Program, fostering high-level expertise in applied mathematics, information sciences, and engineering.

The methodological themes explored by the project teams, particularly through PhD supervision, focus on developing data analysis tools, modeling techniques, and decision-support methods under uncertainty, to be used by other projects.

This cross-cutting positioning places the project in close interaction with other targeted projects and external research programs. Collaboration with the MathVives program is already planned for the co-funding of a PhD thesis and joint responses to calls for proposals.

Work areas

The project is structured primarily around PhD projects, covering several themes within the data–model–decision-making continuum, including:

• Reduced-order risk modeling for computational cost reduction, while preserving generated information quality
• Geometric data analysis for detecting defects/cracks in structures or fiber-optic measurement applications
• Statistical geometry for spatial-temporal modeling of multi-component climatic events
• Assessment of the potential of distributed acoustic sensing (DAS) data in seismology, engineering, earthquake monitoring, and for detecting population and vehicle movements in crisis management
• Physics-informed machine learning to assimilate DAS data for spatial-temporal dynamics in complex environments, such as densely urbanized zones
• Optimal design of natural risk mitigation measures in non-stationary contexts, particularly for gravitational risks (rockfalls)
• Data visualization using persistence diagrams (extremes and topological data) to improve predictions through sparse algorithms, with case studies on droughts, heatwaves, and wildfires.

Scientific Coordination

• Corinne Curt (INRAE).
• Gilles Grandjean (BRGM).
• Franck Lavigne (Université Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne/CNRS).

Context and objectives

Many territories are exposed to and affected by multiple hazards and their interactions. To address these situations, it has become essential to move away from siloed approaches in favor of multifactorial analyses, whether for natural phenomena or socio-economic impact management. These analyses can take several forms:

• Evaluation of combined effects of multiple hazards.
• Analysis of multiple vulnerabilities.
• Management of territories exposed to multi-risks: adaptation of mountainous areas, prevention in overseas territories, and support for analysis and communication on multi-risk issues.

To develop these types of approaches, a wide range of methodologies can be used, including:

• Participatory approaches and surveys (workshops, focus groups, discussions, interviews, and questionnaires): risk perception, adaptation solutions.
• Geo-historical and systemic approaches: multi-risk event chronologies, documentation of related social and physical contexts, typologies of interactions, diachronic qualitative system modeling.
• Numerical simulations, systemic approaches: multi-risk scenario building, cascading effects in mountains, land-sea interactions, multiple vulnerabilities.
• Statistical approaches: modeling of non-stationary extreme values.
• Modeling: advanced mechanical modeling.
• Reflective and communication approaches: improving multi-risk prevention for decision-makers and citizens.

Work Areas

• Disaster prevention in overseas territories.
• Adaptation of mountainous areas to climate change.
• Multi-hazard scenarios and multi-vulnerability assessment.
• Guidance and communication on multi-risks – coastal and mountain zones.

Scientific coordination

• Nestor Herran (Sorbonne Université).
• Jean-Christophe Komorowski (IPGP).
• Sylvie Ollitrault (CNRS).

Context and objectives

In the context of global systemic change, scientific research and expertise face increasing and more complex demands and constraints. The objectives of this project fall into three main categories:

• Stimulate and structure interdisciplinary research on the interactions between science, expert assessments, and policy in response to these evolving demands and constraints.
• Address a set of critical situations, marked by urgency or chronicity, to analyze how scientific knowledge and expertise are generated and circulated across the entire chain of risk knowledge and management.
• Shed light on challenges and provide tools for scientific research and expert  assessment, in collaboration with stakeholders, to strengthen the role of scientific outputs in decision-making and public action at different scales.

Work Areas

• Uncertainties, alerts, and anticipatory governance. Knowledge and expertise generation through the study of urgent situations with multiple uncertainties. This enables analysis of alert trajectories and their articulation with risk reduction policies.
• Methodologies and robustness of expert assessment. Assessment of the expectations and constraints weighing on scientific expert assessment in contexts of multiplying alerts. How to communicate to foster understanding of the processes, contributions, and limits of pre- and post-disaster scientific expert assessment.
• Risk policies in the context of climate change. Evaluating the impact of renewed expert assessments, alerts, and social/militant movements on public debates around risks and on public policy.

Scientific coordination

• Anne Rasmussen (EHESS/CNRS).
• Sébastien Soubiran (Université de Strasbourg).
• Jérôme Vergne (IPGP).

Context and Objectives

• Examine, in the era of global environmental change, how risks are debated in the public sphere, their cultural representations, media coverage, and appropriation by different publics.
• Take stock of existing knowledge and produce new research on how risks are brought into public and cultural arenas, and on the social appropriation of issues around sustainable reduction of disaster risk.
• Co-develop new, innovative forms of social and cultural representations of risks with risk management stakeholders and cultural institutions.
• Contribute to building a risk culture with risk management stakeholders and cultural institutions that enhances the population’s capacity to cope, prevent, and be resilient.

Work Areas

• Cultural and public engagement with risks. Take stock of research and expert analyses on the cultural and public representation of environmental risks and disasters over the long term (museums, media, cinema, literature, etc.).
• Memory, history, and heritage. Examine the multiple temporalities of crisis unfolding and impacts, their history and memory (relations to past, present, and future). Build an open database of new documentary material (everyday objects, scientific instruments, written, audiovisual, and oral archives, buildings, etc.).
• Cultural mediation and experimentation. Renew the design of cultural mediation tools to support the socialization of scientific knowledge on environmental risks and the construction of a risk culture.