At the meeting, Felipe Machado stressed the importance of working together to promote a culture of prevention, adaptation and recovery from disasters.
promote a culture of prevention, adaptation and recovery in the face of disasters.
The first meeting for the creation of the Chilean Network of R+D+i for Disaster Resilience, which had a high participation of interested people.
The activity, which took place on Friday, May 31 in the Federico Saelzer Hall of the Faculty of Forestry and Natural Resources of the UACh, presented ITREND, its main lines of action and discussed the formation of this Network.
Dr. Paula Villagra, an academic from the Institute of Environmental and Evolutionary Sciences of the Faculty of Sciences, Director of the Landscape and Urban Resilience Laboratory (PRULAB) and member of FiReSeS, welcomed those present and commented that "the idea of this meeting is that we can have different views on how this network should work, so we will have a part of this day for a more participatory work to know the concerns that you bring on this topic.
Felipe Machado, director of Itrend, and Catalina Undurraga, deputy director of this organization, gave a presentation on the activities carried out by the Institute. One of the objectives of the organization is to create a national network to bring together all the people who are working in research, development, innovation and entrepreneurship in the field of disaster resilience.
"Itrend is a recently created institute, but we received a legacy that goes back a few years. It all started in 2016 with the Commission for Resilience to Natural Disasters, which was created under the wing of the National Innovation Council for Development (CNID) that works directly with the Presidency of the Nation and covers country issues. This Commission prepared a diagnosis in which they gathered the gaps and challenges that currently exist in Chile in order to move forward and become a more resilient country, proposing ambitious goals such as that 20 years from now we will be a Latin American model in terms of resilience recognized by the ability to anticipate, respond and recover from hazards, to respond and recover from natural hazards and also, from an economic perspective, to become a world pole of attraction with an industry and an entrepreneurial ecosystem capable of providing sophisticated, innovative responses with social and economic impact to respond to natural disasters", said Felipe Machado.
One of the contributions made by the Commission was the elaboration of a definition of resilience, understood as "the capacities of a system, person, community or country, exposed to natural hazards, to anticipate, resist, absorb, adapt and recover from the effects of the natural hazard in an effective and efficient manner to achieve the preservation, restoration and improvement of its structures, basic functions and identity".
In the diagnosis carried out by this Commission, five enabling conditions were defined to make Chile a more resilient country: coordination gap; data and information integration; development of advanced human capital in resilience; development of infrastructure for scientific discovery and innovation in resilience; and scientific dissemination.
"The first enabling condition is the one that brings us here today, since there are several of us working on the issue of resilience, but we do not always do it in a collaborative way and, therefore, we do not know in all cases what is being done, so we are wasting opportunities for collaboration that can be very advantageous," said Felipe Machado.