The U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) Multi-Hazard Project is improving our resiliency to earthquakes, floods, wildfires, landslides, tsunamis, and coastal erosion in southern California. We are doing this by applying science to community decision making and emergency response. The project will help communities reduce their natural hazard threats by directing new and existing science toward gaping vulnerabilities, improving monitoring, producing innovative products, and assuring you know about and benefit from the results.
Americans are more at risk from natural hazards now than at any other time in our nation’s history. Southern California, in particular, has one of the nation’s highest potentials for extreme catastrophic losses due to fires, earthquakes, floods, landslides, and other natural hazards. Expected losses exceed $3 billion per year. These losses can only be reduced through the good decisions guided by the best information about the hazards, risks and cost of mitigation.
The USGS will work with collaborators to set the direction of the research and to create multi-hazard risk frameworks where communities can apply the results of scientific research to their decision making processes. Partners include federal, state, county, city, and other government agencies, public and private utilities, private companies and non-profits, academic researchers and institutions, and emergency response & management agencies.
Multi-disciplinary collaborations have proved successful in many fields and the MHDP extends this powerful model. MHDP projects are developed to unite a broad range of disciplines, to engage basic and applied researchers, to expand capabilities through partnerships, and to share knowledge among researchers, practitioners, policy-makers, and the public. Most significantly, end users actively participate in setting the MHDP project agenda.
MHDP was started as a new USGS project in 2006. To demonstrate the effectiveness of its approach, MHDP began with a focus on southern California and five years of funding. In 2011, the success of the Multi-Hazards Demonstration Project was formally evaluated, with an eye toward establishing other MH projects around the nation. The MHDP is led by a team of experts from the USGS and other collaborating agencies.
