'Mentoring for Resilience': Graduate Students Meet Disaster Resilience Experts

Quezon City, Philippines — The 3rd International Workshop on Multi-Hazard Early Warning and Resilience Building in Coastal Communities under the Capacity Building in Asia for Resilience EducaTion (CABARET) Project was held in Manila on March 25 to 30, 2019. The CABARET project, funded by the EU Erasmus+ programme grant, aimed to strengthen research and innovation capacity for disaster resilience. The project provided support to build capacity for international and regional cooperation between Higher Education Institutions (HEIs) in Asia and Europe, with a special focus on improving multi-hazard early warning (MHEW) systems.

The 3rd International Workshop was mainly hosted by Philippine partner, De La Salle University. The week-long event was capped by the "Mentoring For Resilience" session on March 30, 2019, which was hosted by the Ateneo de Manila University through a collaboration of the Department of Environmental Science and Department of Biology of the School of Science and Engineering, and the Climate Change and Disaster Risk Program of the Ateneo Institute of Sustainability.

The mentoring session provided 20 students from participating institutions the opportunity to deliver a 10-minute presentation to a network of international and interdisciplinary experts in disaster risk and resilience (DRR). The topics presented ranged from disaster risk reduction to improving psychological support for aid workers.

After the presentations, the participating students were then matched to an expert from the CABARET network for a one-on-one mentoring session, which allowed students to gain insights on DRR that were relevant to their work and studies. Some of the experts that served as mentors included Dr. Spec. Ruben Paul Borg (University of Malta, Malta), Prof. Ranjith Dissanayake (University of Peradeniya, Sri Lanka), Prof. Richard Haigh (University of Huddersfield, United Kingdom), Dr. Harkunti P. Rahayu (Institut Teknologi Bandung, Indonesia), and Prof. Boyko Ranguelov (Sofia University of Mining and Geology, Bulgaria).

The Ateneo de Manila University has also integrated several curricular programs on climate change, impacts and risks. Disaster risk and management is taught as a specialized course in the senior high school, while there are courses on examining the physical, environmental and economic impacts of disasters being taught as electives in the Environmental Studies, Physics and Economics Department at the tertiary level, among others. There is also a Master of Disaster Risk and Resilience that has been offered as one of the unique programs being undertaken by the university in the Asian region.