Living with risk: the geography of disasters

Disasters are rarely just natural events. From volcanic eruptions and floods to climate-related hazards and other emergencies, their impacts are shaped by where we live, how societies are organised, and inequalities in power, resources and preparedness.

Join our panel for a discussion exploring how communities experience, understand and respond to disaster risk. Drawing on their research into vulnerability, resilience and environmental hazards, our speakers will examine why some people and places are more exposed than others, how communities navigate uncertainty and what it means to live with risk in an increasingly unpredictable world.

Meet our speakers

• Professor Amy Donovan is a Professor of Environmental Geography at the University of Cambridge whose research focuses on volcanic hazards, disaster risk and the relationship between geographic knowledge and public policy. She explores how scientists, policymakers and communities understand and respond to environmental risks, including how uncertainty shapes decisions about disaster preparedness and risk reduction.
• Dr Tracey Coates is a Senior Lecturer in Human Geography at Kingston University, specialising in the social dimensions of disasters and emergency management. Her research explores community resilience, particularly how communities respond to flooding and how voluntary organisations and local networks can help people prepare for and recover from emergencies.
• Dr Sophie Blackburn is a human geographer at the University of Reading whose research explores the relationship between inequality, development and disaster risk. Her work examines how power, politics and local communities shape vulnerability, resilience and recovery from disasters, as well as efforts to adapt to climate change.
• The discussion will be chaired by Martine Croxall, a BBC News presenter, who studied Geography at the University of Leeds and is a Fellow of the Society.

Please note: The views of our speakers do not necessarily reflect the opinion of the Royal Geographical Society.

Note on captions

The Society aims to provide automatically-generated captions for all event recordings. The captions appear as text at the bottom of the video which you can toggle on and off.

The accuracy of automatically-generated captions varies depending on the audio quality, any specialist language used and the speaker. They are therefore are unlikely to be 100% accurate and the Society does not edit or correct automatically-generated captions.