CERGAS Seminar "Circular health, circular economy, circular urban planning. Working on systemic links that the pandemic has challenged"

The Covid 19 highlighted very clearly the multiple interrelationships and interlinkages between life sustaining systems: the natural and the built environment, the biological and biochemical processes that occur in the latter and the interface between natural and artificial, and the social and economic systems. Such interdependencies and multiple relations have increased tremendously in a world that is not only globalizing but that we also recognize as finite and “small” if compared to the dramatic and fast growing urbanisation and to the unprecedented speed and pace of transportation across and intra continental. Such complexity and the vulnerabilities originating from the interdependencies are not a discovery of today, neither is the fact that crises do not necessarily come as single one shot events but more often implying cascading impacts of differing duration. Researchers in disaster and crisis management studies have been dealing with systemic, social and economic vulnerabilities for a long while and the knowledge that has been generated insofar could have been better used during the various phases of the pandemic. The seminar provides the opportunity to tackle the crisis (or better the crises) triggered by the pandemic from the angle of research and practice of the management of natural disasters and man made accidents to propose new paths of analysis, research and practical activities in institutions and communities.

Speaker: Scira Menoni, Politecnico di Milano. 

Full professor at the Politecnico di Milano-Italy, she teaches also at a Specialization Certificate at the Geneva University-Switzerland. Presently seconded national expert at DG RTD of the European Commission. Recent research experiences in a number of EU funded projects: currently coordinating the Lode project (Loss Data Enhancement for DRR and CCA Management), and previously on the same topic Idea project (Improving Damage assessments to Enhance cost-benefit Analyses) both funded by DG-ECHO and has been leading a partners’ unit in a Horizon 2020 EDUCEN (European Disasters in Urban centres: a Culture Expert Network (3C – Cities, Cultures, Catastrophes). In the context of scientific international cooperation she has participated to the Alfa program with Central America and to a networking EU-Mexico initiative (Red sobre riesgo y vulnerabilidad: estrategias sociales de prevencion y adaptacion). Through university/public administration agreements she has and still is consulting governmental agencies on risk mitigation and management related issues, such as with the Regional Governments of the Emilia Romagna Region, the Lombardia Region on critical infrastructures, she was the coordinator of the committee to develop the Risk Prevention Plan and the Emergency Management Plan of the Milano Province. More recently she has been consulting for the Po Riverbasin Authority and still is for the Umbria Region in the context of the interdisciplinary and interdepartmental GRID Group collaboration, that was also granted a Polisocial Award in 2013. Recent publications: Walia A., Menoni S. (Lead Authors) & al. (2021). 3.1: Methodologies for disaster impact assessment. In In Poljansek K., M. Martin Ferrer, T. De Groeve, I. Clark Eds) Science for DRM 2020: acting today, protecting tomorrow, European Commission, DG-JRC – DRMKC; Menoni S., R. Schwarze (2020). Recovery during a crisis: facing the challenges of risk assessment and resilience management of COVID-19. Environment Systems and Decisions, 40:2; Menoni S, M.P. Boni (2020). A systemic approach for dealing with chained damages triggered by natural hazards in complex human settlements. International Journal of Disaster Risk Reduction, vol 51:1-3.

Webinar link: https://unibocconi-it.zoom.us/j/91749802892

Please note that participation to the webinar will be in online mode only.