Tuesday, August 20, 2013

Presentation at the APHW Conference in Korea

Today I had a presentation at the 6th Asia Pacific Association of Hydrology and Water Resources Conference. It was held at the Korea University, in Seoul, South Korea. The presentation schedules can be viewed here.

Luckily I was accompanied by a supervisor, so we could share our astonishment on not being able to read anything around us for a change. Needless to say, the conference was excellently organized and surprisingly, we met many people from other research institutes in Japan. The title of my presentation was 'Quantifying the effectiveness of measures taken for vulnerable people in disaster risk management (DRM) in the Netherlands'. Up to now I only have the Dutch figures to display. 
Ms. Min Young Kim commented on how to obtain responses from interviews with local people. In her research in Korea she had encountered much resistance and reluctance to discuss individual DRM measures. I am still in the process of developing these data gathering methods and was disappointed I would not be able to perform such local interviews myself. 
However, after hearing about her difficulties I reconsidered, and I believe her experience might serve as partial justification not to conduct the interviews as I had expected quite the opposite reaction from local people. 


 We had only one day to stay at the conference before flying back to Tsukuba, but we did take the opportunity to enjoy the restored inner city river, which is a popular outing place for families and young adults alike. More details of this project can be found here.




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