Exploring the possibility of an online synthesis system for disaster risk reduction as a tool to promote “Consilience” of knowledge and practice

This paper proposes an international collaborative project to construct an online synthesis system initiated by the Japanese National Committee for Integrated Research on Disaster Risk (IRDR). The purpose of this project is to facilitate knowledge consilience on disaster and environmental risk reduction by improving disaster resilience, which is an indispensable element of sustainable development. This system will provide a free internet environment, named Design Trend Press, for users in each country or region. All stakeholders involved in disaster risk reduction can make and register their own contributions in various forms on this system, using their own language in terms of seven targets and four priority actions specified in the Sendai Framework for Disaster Risk Reduction (SFDRR, or Sendai Framework). To make this project successful, an international advisory board should be established to supervise the ontology of the keywords to be used for the classification and categorization of individual entries.