Real impact - who are the #unsungheros ?

I’m blessed to work with some incredible people but what is becoming increasingly apparent to me, is that those who are potentially having the biggest impact on society, especially in the context of reducing risk from volcanoes, are those that very often are not in the limelight. They often don’t publish articles in Nature, they don’t receive awards or plaudits or recognition. In fact – I might go as far as suggesting that in the current ways that the research councils or funding bodies value and encourage impact – they are almost irrelevant.

This troubles me deeply. Modern volcanology is about a systematic process aimed at reducing the adverse affects of volcanoes by understanding the causes of disasters and promoting strategies that limit exposure, reduce vulnerability, enhance early-warning and improve preparedness for future events. Don’t get me wrong – this requires excellent science – it really does, but what is ‘excellent science’?

I would wager that on many research proposals about volcanoes, that people say “the results from this study…could further scientific understanding and…help reduce risk”. This is a great aim – but are we as a community valuing and encouraging and promoting and supporting those people who are actually doing this? Not writing about it in a proposal or talking about it on TV – but those actually doing it?

Here’s who I think we undervalue:

• ·      People who do painstaking work on databases
• ·      Scientists and technicians working in volcano observatories who work tirelessly to just ensure that data is even collected, let alone write fancy research about it
• ·      Scientists who devote time and effort to listening to the needs of research partners and being respectful of them
• ·      Researchers who do modeling work for others for free or without meaningful acknowledgment
• ·      Those that work tirelessly to bring people together and develop and strengthen collaboration
• ·      Those senior people/professors who spend all of their time trying to find work for others or trying to make things happen – who perhaps don’t have a lot of time for themselves or their own research
• ·      Nice – unselfish people – who just want to help out

My fundamental problem with ‘impact’ is that the way that it is conceptualised is inherently selfish. That’s fine if the motivation for doing good work is just for the thrill of discovery, furthering ‘science’ or for personal gain – but most people working in volcanology or disaster risk reduction have base motivations that they want to help avoid disasters and improve people’s lives.

Surely we can’t go on in this way? Are we in danger that the impact agenda forces good and humble people to be self-serving?  Whereas, the reality is that true ‘impact’ is often made by those who are happy to just be ‘making cups of tea’ for the rest of the team.

Here’s my challenge to anyone that reads this (all 10 of you) – find a way to support, encourage and promote those who are doing the unselfish things. Because – those people often barely survive month to month, rarely get plaudits or awards, don’t get huge research grants, are often unable to attend conferences, and often don’t have time to blog or tweet.

I’m sure that I am not alone in thinking this – We all have too many conversations or hear too many stories about people being overlooked, undervalued and un-supported. What can we do about it?

I think that these people don’t need you to shout about them or cover them in decorations. They just need encouragement and support and to know their worth. Find those  #unsungheros and that’s where you will find real and meaningful impact.

Additional comment - people can be successful without being self-serving. But this post is about recognising those that aren't normally recognised :) 

Where are all of the engineers?

I'm biased, but I think engineers are pretty awesome. Turn on a tap and water just appears! Turn on a switch and a room is brought to light by a glowing pice of metal! Descend underground on magical moving escalators and take a train across a city! Fly around the world in something that weights 650 tonnes - not being an aeronautical engineer even I think A380s look and feel like some sort of wizardry!

WOW - engineering is essential to so much in human life. It solves every day problems with pragmatic solutions that are useable, useful and used.

People may consider engineers to:

Here's another definition:

Credit: http://www.amazon.com/ComputerGear-Engineer-Definition-T-shirt/dp/B009QR8P64/ref=pd_sim_a_11?ie=UTF8&refRID=1TE81YEM838ADXDMCQKB

So, now we have my 'unbiased' opinion cleared up (!), here's my question:

Why are there so few engineers involved in solving the problems of disaster risk and development?

The above skills strike me as a very similar set of skills that are needed in the field of Disaster Risk Reduction or DRR. To reduce disasters we need problem solvers, who can keep to a budget, who can think about future issues, who collaborate daily, who achieve results. Engineers have the attributes and inherent characteristics of the people who are needed.

So where are we?

Designing mega structures to be proud of?

Struggling for a 3% profit margin (much less than is deserved!) on city projects?

Delivering Olympic Parks?

All of these things are needed and are brilliant. But there must be more of us that care about humanitarian issues; that feel responsibility when we watch pictures on our screens of Haiti flattened by poorly designed concrete that we know, if we had designed, would have stood up and not wiped out that family. There is so much good work engineering work going on in developing countries, but there needs to be much more.

I recently attended the Pai Lin Li lecture at the Institute of Structural Engineers in London about transition shelters used by two NGOs in Ecuador and Haiti. But although these organisations are trying to provide shelter to vulnerable families, actually, they could be making them more vulnerable by providing shelter that is not engineered. And you know, engineering doesn't always make things more expensive. Actually, very often the opposite. We know how to design buildings. We know where to save on materials and where to reinforce. As a practising engineers, delivering money saving solutions is our job description!

Today I found out that Architects for Humanity are closing. Known for their great strap line 'Design Like You Give a Damn', and enigmatic founder Cameron Sinclair (here is his 2006 TED talk) this is one of the organisations that inspired me to do what I am now. So it's a sad day for them, me and for this type of work. Lack of funding is quoted to be the main issue: 

"It is that humanitarian design isn't considered a fundamental right. And that today, in San Francisco, it is easier to find funding for an app than to fund an organization which transforms lives."

So, here's my challenge. Let's stand up, be engineers and deliver engineering solutions to the developed and developing worlds. Let's 'obnoxiously insist' that things are 'done the right way'.

Here are some links to some organisations that might inspire you to get involved:

Architecture for Humanity

Build Change

EPICentre at UCL

Arup International Development

Engineers Against Poverty

Into the volcano: why glamourise the danger?

Into the volcano: why glamourise the danger?

Volcanologists wearing hard hats at Yassur several years ago. Take note BBC. (Photo @volcanna) 

Volcanoes are exciting things to see. Amazing cultures exist on their slopes. They threaten ways of life around them.

Hence, they make great TV – but I was disappointed with the first episode of BBC’s Into the Volcano.

Here’s why:

1) They weren’t wearing hard hats!!

Most volcanologists wear hard hats, even on volcanoes that haven’t been recently active. It’s now common practice, much like wearing a helmet whilst cycling or on a building site. I thought that these days all volcanologists wore them (especially when close to an exploding vent!). Even the smallest of ballistics from an explosion can kill someone. I have spoken at length to some of those who helped rescue survivors following the Galeras 1993 eruption – want an opinion on hard hats…ask them!

2) I question the risk/reward of collecting the lava bomb ‘fresh sample’

Did you know that there are actually quite a few volcanologists from Vanuatu, including many disaster management professionals, many of whom I often see at international conferences. I contacted them to ask why they didn’t appear in the programme. This was part of their reply:

“what was programmed to be shown by scientists for this show is not real and is against what we have been preaching to communities here, we educate the communities to take care of themselves not to throw themselves into the volcano!!!! Therefore we [Ni-Vanuatu scientists] ended up withdrawing ourselves from this filming campaign because what is being shown is not real, we do not go into the crater to collect data!!!!”

Maybe someone can give me a wholly convincing reason of why collecting a barely warm ‘fresh' sample was worth it, compared to the other bombs that they might have collected that were much nearer?

3) Volcanoes are dangerous enough – we don’t need to glamourise the risk

Volcanoes are really dangerous. They kill people. They force communities to change their ways of life to avoid potential harm. They also kill volcanologists and tourists who visit them. I’m very unimpressed with the producers for glamourising the danger, showing scientists collecting rocks without even the most modest health and safety equipment. I’m also sad that the scientists made this choice.

Most volcanologists work to reduce volcanic risk by increasing our knowledge of them through science and learning how to work with people living near them. Much of what was in this programme was laddish behaviour that I would expect to see (and admittedly sometimes enjoy) from the chaps at Top Gear.

BBC Into the volcano went to a location with the intention of doing something that is immensely dangerous, where the local volcanologists didn’t want to be involved, for limited scientific reward; this hasn’t done much to enhance the image of volcanology as a science that primarily aims to reduce risk.

"I knew it all along..." - avoiding hindsight bias after eruptions

“I knew it all along…” – as volcanologists, we need to be careful not to fall into the many traps that come from retrospectively looking at and indeed commenting on crises or catastrophes such as the recent eruption of Ontake.

There is a fantastic book you might want to read: Thinking fast and slow by Daniel Kahneman, which synthesises a huge body of research about how and why we make the decisions we make, particularly when it comes to risk and uncertainty. Many readers of this blog will be familiar with Kahneman’s papers, notably the 1976 “Heuristics and Biases” work with Amos Taversky. Others will be familiar with some of the work by his former PhD student Baruch Fischhoff on (among other things) risk communication*. I was planning on writing a short review of Thinking fast and slow from the perspective of what volcanologists can learn from cognitive psychology, but the eruption in Japan has got me thinking about one particular cognitive trap – the ‘hindsight bias’ or the ‘I knew it all along principle’, first investigated by Baruch Fischoff.

The key message is that as a group we must be very careful that when looking back at past eruptions, particularly when eyeballing monitoring data post-hoc, that we don’t make pronouncements about “missed warning signs” because we interpret things with the benefit of hindsight.

It turns out that it is very difficult for a human mind to reconstruct what we thought about something once we adopt a new belief about it. It leads us to believe that we understand the past, overstating the accuracy of the beliefs that we held (or would have held) at the time, as these are corrupted by what we now know. Kahneman suggests that if we are surprised by an unpredicted event, we adjust our view of the world to accommodate that surprise. Thus when we look back, we forget the state of mind or understanding that we had at the time, and simply think about what we know now.

What hindsight bias can do is lead us to interpret the quality of a decision (such as the recommendation for some kind of mitigative action) on whether the outcome was positive or negative, rather than whether or not the decision making process was sound. This bias leads us to a) overstate our expertise post-hoc, b) neglect the role of luck (or lack of it) in a particular outcome and c) suppress any memory of the effect that uncertainty will have had on our or other people’s interpretations/decisions.

Our natural tendency is to criticise decision making on risk issues when an outcome is negative, and neglect to recognise or praise decision-making when the outcome was good; this ‘outcome bias’ (a facet of hindsight) affects our interpretation of past events far more than we might realise. When considering what might happen at a volcano, a simplistic explanation is that we can consider the probability of an eruption happening given some monitoring signal [P(A|B)]. But, after an event has occurred…it’s quite different! It’s no longer an event that could happen (a chance or likelihood) but a certainty. So when we re-interpret past events, hindsight bias makes it very difficult for us in our present state of certainty, to acknowledge the attendant uncertainty before the eruption occurred. We find it very difficult to reconstruct or understand what our past belief would have been.

Kahneman suggests that these biases make it “almost impossible to evaluate a decision in terms of the beliefs that were reasonable when the decision was made”.

In fact, research suggests that the worse or more shocking a catastrophe is, the more acute hindsight bias becomes (think back to reactions in the aftermath of 9/11). This – in the case of Ontake – is reflected by language such as “failed to forecast” used in many** news articles.

So what does this mean for volcanologists in the wake of a tragedy such as the eruption of Ontake? Well, the first thing we should be aware of is that our opinions post-hoc, about what monitoring data may or may not have shown, or what decisions should or shouldn’t have been made, are prone to huge biases. So, we should be very careful what we voice about these events…particularly to the media! If we are going to retrospectively look at something, let’s do it in a robust and sensible way, such as the work by TheaHinks, Willy Aspinall and others on the 1976 eruption of Soufriére Guadeloupe.

Another point is that from afar – not being a Japanese volcanologist working on Ontake – the availability of information for us to be able make an informed opinion is surely very limited (what Kahneman refers to as the ‘availability bias’ or the ‘what you see is all there is to know principle’). So, just as we should be very cautious about talking about ‘missed signs’, we should also be aware that when we say things like ‘it’s impossible/very difficult to predict such eruptions’ or ‘there were no precursors’, our opinions are perhaps based on very sparse evidence (of course we can draw on other examples from other cases – but hopefully you get my point). In essence, maybe we could do with waiting for a little more information before passing comment.

Hopefully you get the idea that if you haven’t yet read Thinking fast and slow, then please do. It’s very difficult to overcome the various heuristics and biases that affect our opinions and decisions (even Kahneman admits to relentlessly struggling with this) …but being aware of them is an excellent first step.

 * Want to know more about the science of risk communication - read this excellent paper by Nick Pidgeon and Baruch Fischhoff 

** Not all articles/commentaries fall foul of the hindsight bias -  if you want to read some measured and not overly opinionated articles by volcanologists about the Ontake eruption – you might want to look here (Becky Williams) and here (Eruptions blog).

New paper published!

My first ever paper has been published: http://www.appliedvolc.com/content/3/1/11

I'll write a longer blog post about it soonish. It is open access, so anyone can read!

Behind the scenes: making a film about La Soufriére

You can imagine my surprise when I was the first person on a long list not too busy to head out to St Vincent to make a film about La Soufrière…! Having worked on St Vincent before, I sort of knew what to expect – volcanic paradise.

The plan was to make a series of short films about the volcano, describing its recent eruptions, how people responded to eruptions in the past, and what might happen at the volcano in the future. We didn’t want to just make a documentary, or do something just for the sake of ‘outreach’ – we wanted to be able to tell the story of living alongside a volcano through the experiences of those that are.

La Soufrière rising into the clouds, as seen from above the town of Chateaubelair.

For the two volcanologists, Richie Robertson (Seismic Research Centre, UWI) and I – filming in the field with a professional company was a totally new experience. Similarly, the crew from Lambda Films had yet to test their skills in either the tropics or on an active volcano.

La Soufrière is an extraordinary volcano, which dominates the northern third of St Vincent. Its lush green slopes show little sign of its destructive past; the products of large eruptions in 1979 and 1902 barely visible to the untrained eye. This is a common problem to encounter on low altitude volcanoes in the tropics, as the vegetation very quickly obscures where pyroclastic density currents have burnt the landscape. Yet, with a keen eye and, of course, knowing where to look, you can uncover the signs of the past. Our first filming location with Richie was at a sugar plantation, destroyed by the 1902 eruption. Buildings covered in ash and flow deposits up to their roof, only the top of a window and the giant water wheel are still visible. Much industry like this, situated on the volcano’s slopes was damaged to such an extent in 1902, that many plantations and farms never recovered. The same happened in 1979, and although a smaller eruption, the long-term effects were felt by many.

Richie describing the societal effects of past eruptions at a destroyed sugar mill.

We interviewed many people who had lived through the 1979 eruption, and they recounted their experiences for us. It’s really important for memories of past eruptions to be recorded and passed down between generations and shared with communities elsewhere in the world. Although all volcanoes are different, erupting into a vast range of social and economical contexts, many of the struggles and challenges of living with them are shared. With this series of films, we hope to show some of these challenges and how people adapted.

For a researcher who is used to interviewing or conducting focus groups, doing this from behind a camera whilst trying to get responses that would contain sound-bites for a film, was very different! I normally have a very conversational interviewing style, but the camera can inhibit this a little. However, the limitations of using a video camera became insignificant when reviewing the footage. Interviews, descriptions of past events and, most importantly, the people themselves, came to life on screen. We are sure that the footage we collected will be a great legacy for people on St Vincent.

The team interviewing a lady about the 1979 eruption, with La Soufrière in the background.

As well as the interviews, the team hiked up the volcano, to film its crater and the deposits on the flanks. I had a brilliant idea to climb it at 3am – so that we could film sunrise over Georgetown, an at risk town on the eastern flanks. This ‘romantic sunrise trek’, on offer at many volcanoes worldwide, was a total fail – we could only see 10m in front of us…! Nevertheless, at the top of the volcano, any notion of vegetated slopes or a hidden past is literally blown away when you reach the rim of the crater and stare down inside. The clouds swirl and part… three hundred meters below, the crater floor expands into the distance, interrupted by a lava dome, the scale of which is indeterminable to your eyes, is then encircled by the wall on other side – over 1.5km away. A local guide, Delroy Browne, once told me that his favourite thing about climbing La Soufrière is to see the look on people’s faces when they look into it. He isn’t wrong!!

The crater of La Soufrière, with the lava dome from 1979 in the centre.

To get into the crater to do our filming, we had to descend the very steep walls, with a thick rope to stop you from sliding down (probably a long way) if you were to lose your footing. The film crew with their kit, me with their water and tripod, and Richie survived the descent unscathed, and set about a day filming down there.

The team descending the crater walls.

The crater is so important, both physically and symbolically. The exposures of rock in the walls, showing old lava flows and explosive eruptions, tell us a story about the volcano, which is so difficult to see anywhere else. For the people of the island, the crater is a foreboding location, the source of rumor, intrigue and potential devastation. Standing in it, swirling banks of clouds often obscure the walls, wafts of sulphurous gasses coming from the many fumaroles heighten the sense of excitement. We of course unleashed both of the drones that we brought with us to get some aerial shots. Following a good morning filming, including a breakfast of hotdogs – cooked in the dome’s gas vent, we climbed back out and made our way back down.

Shot from the volcanocopter of Lamba Film’s drone filming Richie Robertson in the crater

Despite having been to St Vincent before, or indeed being fortunate enough to work on many incredible volcanoes, the experience of making a film about one is something that I, and I imagine the rest of the team, will never forget. Quite what makes St Vincent feel so special to me, I don’t know.Whether it was incredible street-cooked jerked bbq food, an extraordinary volcano, some of the friendliest people you can find, a rich history or a volcanically threatened future – it has to be near the top of a volcanologist’s bucket-list for fieldwork.
Risk communication can be a tough task, in many cases it is a balancing act between communicating the right message to get people interested/concerned enough about a hazard so that they think about it and plan for it, whilst not overreacting to it. Undoubtedly, St Vincent will experience eruptions from La Soufriére in the future that will threaten communities and ways of life, but we hope that making and showing films like this can help to strengthen resilience there by learning from the past, and telling that story through the eyes of those that lived through it.

(This post was originally written for the London Volcano blog)

The Inefficiency of Compassion

After a large earthquake first news comes of fatalities and numbers people affected, but soon after estimations of the cost of the disaster are reported. This figure tends to rise as time passes, however usually the economic burden is much larger with indirect losses felt in the local communities affected, such as uninsured losses, loss of income, business downtime, etc. But could all of this financial loss be, in fact, not lost and instead used to develop and strengthen resilience in communities?

I heard a story once of a factory in Asia built for use by a western company. The highly seismic area was prone to large earthquakes, so to avoid losses through downtime the factory was built to the highest standards. When a large earthquake came, the factory was in good shape and able to open the next day. However, no one turned up to work. The staff had been made homeless, lost loved ones, were injured or some even killed. From this example it becomes obvious that strengthening works, but the effects of disaster are wider spread and, in order to achieve resilience, investment and strengthening needs to consider multiple aspects.

Recently, a headline used by Care International struck me:

'Fixing the Inefficiency of Compassion'.

The article highlights the ineffective use of funds in the aftermath of disasters, when the same money could protect so many more people and therefore avoid suffering by many. A previous blog post of mine explains that 'for every $1 spent on disaster preparedness, between $2 and $7 is saved in disaster response'. There are various other values calculated by different institutions but the commonality is that it is always better value for money to invest in DRR than to spend on post-disaster recovery.

But how do we fix this inefficient spending? How to we encourage aid donations to be made when there isn't yet suffering. Is it enough to say "Your dollar will go further if you give it now, before hurricane season". Would you donate then?

The organisation Build Change is one example of a proactive organisation that aims to protect communities, instead of helping to 'pick up the pieces'. They have a wealth of technical resources, inspiring projects and opportunities to be involved.

Supporting a charity like gives you the best value for money, almost like a bargain and we all love a bargain.