The Centre for Disaster Resilience works across discipline and international boundaries to reduce disaster risk and promote global sustainable growth.
We do this through fundamental, interdisciplinary and applied research, dissemination, education and training, international cooperation, and providing advisory services.
Find out what the CDR is about in this animation produced for the official opening of the CDR by H.R.H. Princess Margriet and CDR lead Dr. Irene Manzella
Advancing disaster resilience
We live in a rapidly changing world. The world population increased from 2 billion one hundred years ago to 8 billion now and expecting
to reach 10 billion by 2050. Our society also has grown in complexity and it is extremely dependent on fragile utility systems. Energy consumption led to large emissions of green house gasses, leading to global warming, sea level rise and increase of extreme events. All these factors increasingly expose ourselves and our communities to disasters.
Disaster events in the last two decades took more than 1 million lives, affected more than 4 billion people, and caused nearly 3 trillion dollars in losses worldwide. The impact of natural disasters is unevenly distributed over the world, with the majority of the impact occurring in the low and mid-income countries with a dramatic reduction in the economic and social development.
However, there are significant progress in technology, such as the deployment of multiple and highly sophisticated satellite systems, the development of machine learning and big data analysis techniques, enabling us to find new solutions to global challenges. These include climate change, increasing disaster impacts and claim for sufficient and secure food, water, energy, health, land and housing.
The CDR is hosted by the Faculty for Geo-Information Science and Earth Observation (ITC) which was founded in 1950 with the core mission and ambition to teach and facilitate the effective use of geo-information and earth observation knowledge, particularly in the field of hazard, risk, and resilience.