The Indian Geophysical Union (IGU) and North-Eastern Hill University are jointly organising the 58th annual convention on the theme ‘Recent Advances in Earth Sciences with Special Emphasis – Natural Hazards’.
The convention began today and will run until Friday.
The three-day virtual convention will cover award talks and technical sessions on various disciplines of Earth Sciences, such as Solid Earth Geosciences, Marine Geosciences, Atmospheric, Planetary and Space Sciences. More than 200 delegates, including 80 research scholars and students, have registered for the convention.
At today’s inaugural session, the welcome address was delivered by NEHU Vice-Chancellor Prof PS Shukla. In his address he mentioned that Earth is facing different types of problems due to natural hazards and he reiterated that it is essential to carry out scientific research using a holistic approach to meet these challenges.
IGU president Prof Shailesh Nayak, who is also the Director of the National Institute of Advanced Studies, highlighted the major challenges for the sustainability of mankind i.e., natural hazards and climate change.
He mentioned that natural hazards essentially represent the extreme fluctuations of average dynamic state of the earth system and the effective response to any such hazardous events depend on the quality of scientific knowledge about that hazard, expertise of the organizations who are responsible for responding to such extreme events and the hazard consciousness of the communities involved.
He also emphasized that the building of effective resilience to natural hazards needs to be addressed at all the three levels viz. the global or the earth system, the social system comprising infrastructure, and industrial capability and the human system.
The chief guest, M Ravichandran, the Secretary of the Union Ministry of Earth Sciences, mentioned that the increasing frequency, intensity, and severity of natural hazards is one of the most pressing global environmental change problems. He stressed that from the local to the global level, governments and civil society need to increase resilience to these hazards. According to him there is no way to avoid the natural hazards but to study them for resilience.
The IGU president then honoured meritorious senior and young scientists with IGU National Awards for 2021. This was followed by the Prof KR Ramanathan Memorial Lecture by Ravichandran.
Two technical sessions followed with presentations on previous hypotheses or hazard scenarios; solutions for risk mitigations; integration of hazard assessment in risk analysis and development of new techniques and methodologies; studies on societal impacts of natural hazards; new findings to understand the triggering and propagation mechanisms were conducted.
The presenters were eminent scientists, researchers and students from various parts of the country. Altogether, there will be 10 technical sessions during the three-day programme.
