Ahead of the Disaster: Turning Prediction into Protection and Prevention

Satellites, supercomputers, and data are available today to predict climate disasters better than ever before. Yet across the globe, extreme heat, floods, and storms continue to catch communities off guard, often hitting the poorest and most vulnerable the hardest. If these disasters can be seen coming, why is there still a struggle to stop the damage?

The problem is not just the physics of the atmosphere—it is the last mile of policy and human response. For an early warning system to be effective and help save lives, a scientific forecast must be transformed into a political decision, a clear message, and a localized, concrete plan of action.

Join Perry World House, the Penn Center for Science, Sustainability, and the Media, and Center for East Asian Studies, for a discussion on how to bridge the gap between high-level climate modeling and practical disaster risk management. Experts will explore how to turn “big data” into “big action” to strengthen global resilience and protect communities.

The event will feature Mami Mizutori, Perry World House Distinguished Fellow, Japan Foundation Visiting Fellow at the Center for East Asian Studies, Specially Appointed Professor at Tohoku University, and former Head of the UN Office for Disaster Risk Reduction. It will be moderated by Dr. Michael Mann, Presidential Distinguished Professor at the University of Pennsylvania and Director of the Penn Center for Science, Sustainability, and the Media.

Speakers

Mami Mizutori was the Special Representative of the UN Secretary General for Disaster Risk Reduction and the Head of the UN Office for Disaster Risk Reduction from March 2018 until December 2023. Previously, from 2011 she served as the Executive Director of the Sainsbury Institute for the Study of Japanese Arts and Cultures at the University of East Anglia, United Kingdom. Mami joined the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Japan in 1983, where she was responsible as the Director of the United Nations Policy Division, the National Security Policy Division and the Status of US Forces Agreement Division, and Director of the Japan Information and Culture Centre at the Japanese Embassy in London. She was also stationed at the Japanese embassies of Washington DC and Mexico City. She is currently a Specially Appointed Professor and Strategic Management Advisor at Tohoku University with a focus on disaster risk reduction and an Advisor to Mitsui Sumitomo Insurance Co., Ltd. She is a member of the Advisory Board of the Centre for the Study of Existential Risk, Cambridge University, UK and on the Board of the Association for Aid and Relief Japan, a Japanese NPO focusing on refugees and internally displaced people globally and in Japan.

Dr. Michael Mann is Presidential Distinguished Professor in the Department of Earth and Environmental Science at the University of Pennsylvania, with a secondary appointment in the Annenberg School for Communication. His research focuses on climate science and climate change. He was selected by Scientific American as one of the fifty leading visionaries in science and technology in 2002, was awarded the Hans Oeschger Medal of the European Geophysical Union in 2012. He made Bloomberg News‘ list of fifty most influential people in 2013. He has received the Friend of the Planet Award from the National Center for Science Education, the Stephen H. Schneider Award for Outstanding Climate Science Communication from Climate, the Award for Public Engagement with Science from the AAAS, the Climate Communication Prize from the American Geophysical Union and the Leo Szilard Award of the American Physical Society. He received the Tyler Prize for Environmental Achievement 2019 and was elected to the National Academy of Sciences in 2020. He is a Fellow of the AGU, AMS, GSA, AAAS and the Committee for Skeptical Inquiry. He is co-founder of RealClimate.org, author of more than 200 peer-reviewed and edited publications, numerous op-eds and commentaries, and five books including Dire Predictions, The Hockey Stick and the Climate Wars, The Madhouse Effect, The Tantrum that Saved the World, and The New Climate War.

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