ΓΕΝΙΚΑ

Extreme natural disasters as well as catastrophic technological failures may cause damages to the natural and the built environment and even loss of human life. The level of their potential impact, in terms of damages and losses, is usually magnified by the lack or poor disaster management planning against such hazards.

The hazards to the natural and built environment are associated with earthquakes, land and coastal floods, tsunamis, soil and coastal erosion, landslides, pollution of air, water and soil, forest fires, etc. In Greece, during the last few years, additional hazards, beyond the usual ones (earthquakes and forest fires), appear at an alarming rate; being either natural ones related to climate change (floods, for example) or technological related to operational failures (oil spills, for example).

The importance of research activities for hazard prediction-protection-mitigation is internationally recognized on one hand by the Office for Disaster Risk Reduction (www.unisdr.org) of the United Nations (UNDRR) and on the other hand by several national Research Institutes and Centers (for example, the “Centre of Natural Hazards and Disaster Science”, www.cnds.se, in Sweden, and the “International Research Institute of Disaster Science”, irides.tohoku.ac.jp, in Japan) whose aim is similar to the one of the “Research Institute of Advanced Technologies for Prevention and Mitigation of Hazards” at the Research Center of the University of Patras.