On January 26th, 2010, the major project of National Natural Science Foundation of China, namely “Research on Integrated Disaster Risk Assessment and Governance Paradigm in Regions of Rapid Urbanization”, which lasted from January of 2006 to December of 2009 and charged by Professor Shi Peijun was passed on the Project Evaluation Conference organized by the National Natural Science Foundation. It was rated by experts as an outstanding project, with the comment “accomplished its aim and made significant breakthroughs in its research”.
As a subject of the science plan “Regional Sustainable Development”, the project, with regional development and disaster mitigation as its aim, set up a fairly all-round integrated risk assessment system in urban areas. On this basis, a regional integrated disaster risk governance paradigm was proposed. So far, the progress of the project concluded were as follows: it revealed the influence of rapid urbanization on flood; “regional disaster” was initiated and widely promoted in Hunan and other regions; “catastrophe risk governance paradigm” was proposed and put into use when the snow storm hit northern China in 2008, which showed that the paradigm would be wide spreading in the future.
The project cultivated one discipline leader (aging 40-50), 23 postgraduates and one post doctor.
With the support of the project as well as the others, Professor Shi Peijun and German scientist Carlo Jaeger jointly launched and co-chaired the “IHDP-IRG (Integrated Risk Governance)”. “2009 Asian Conference on Risk Assessment and Management” and “The Second International Conference on Asian Catastrophe Insurance” was successfully held. Ten members of the project went abroad to take part in the International Academic Conference on Integrated Risk Management, which enhanced the young scholars’ competency in international academic exchanges.
In general, the findings and achievements of the projects are of great theoretical and practical importance to the governance and mitigation of disaster risk in China.