Caltech will launch a Center for Disaster Resilience on Wednesday, Nov. 11, with the mission of bringing scientists deeper into policy decision-making across Southern California.
Longtime seismologist Dr. Lucy Jones will serve as director of the new center, building on her nonprofit, the Dr. Lucy Jones Center for Science and Society, which she started about a decade ago. At the time, Jones had left the U.S. Geological Survey to pursue policy work, which she was not allowed to do at USGS.
Like her nonprofit, the mission of the Center for Disaster Resilience will be “to support the application of science in the creation of more resilient communities,” Jones said. The center’s central goal will be to bridge the gap between scientists, whose findings hold answers to how to best respond to and mitigate disasters, and local decision-makers and community members.
“I can see how science could really help people deal with disasters,” Jones said. “But the structure of science in the United States is not very accommodating of that. You don’t get tenure at Caltech because of policy work. You need to be publishing papers. So there’s essentially a disincentive for young scientists to get involved in this.”
At Caltech, Jones will be able to tap into the far-reaching network of scientists there.
“It turns out there’s a lot of scientists here who would love their science to be used, but don’t have the connections or the experience on how to get that to happen,” Jones said.
Jones, a longtime visiting associate at Caltech’s Seismological Laboratory, began to brainstorm the idea for the center last winter with Zhongwen Zhan, the director of the Seismological Laboratory. Zhan said both he and Jones saw a need for improved scientific communication.
“Our traditional ways of sharing information have been less effective than before — taking phone calls, taking TV interviews. Now it’s becoming so much more social media and other forms of communication,” Zhan said. “I’d been discussing a lot with her, and that process really sharpened my view that we need this center in the Seismo Lab to help us do better in science communication.”
Jones officially came on board at Caltech as a faculty member in August to become director of the new center.
The center will focus not only on earthquakes, but also on various other disasters that plague Southern California, including wildfires, flooding, tropical storms and extreme heat.
To help boost scientific engagement in disaster efforts, the center will aim to create “alliances” among stakeholders involved in disaster resilience, Jones said. These partners will include cities, counties and major utilities, which will be able to connect with scientists through the center so they can make evidence-based decisions.
“We know that the best way to deal with losses is to prevent them from happening in the first place,” Jones said. “It is, by far, the most cost-effective way to deal with disasters. And yet it’s hard to accomplish, and you can’t do it if you don’t know what the science says is going to be coming.”
Jones and the Center for Disaster Resilience are spearheading a new iteration of the ShakeOut Scenario, which Jones crafted while working at USGS in 2008. The ShakeOut Scenario aimed to map out what the impact of a big earthquake would look like so that policymakers could prepare. But now Jones and other scientists are working on a “ShakeOut Scenario 2.0” to broaden and update the initial scenario.
“Society has changed since that scenario was written. The pandemic showed us how remote work can really function in society, and the wildfires showed us a lot about how communities recover or not, and some of the political challenges that come up,” Jones said. “We wanted to redo the scenario, but do it explicitly in terms of supporting decision-makers, so that we’ll say here’s what would happen if a big earthquake happened today — not just numbers of buildings down or people killed, but also social disruption and mass migration and economic disruption.”
The ShakeOut Scenario 2.0 project involves not only seismologists and engineers, but also economists and social scientists who are analyzing economic and social consequences of disasters. It will also evaluate secondary disasters like fires, mudslides and chemical spills.
The Center for Disaster Resilience will also lean heavily into the social science side of disaster management, focusing on ways to make sure important information about disasters is reaching community members. Jones said that in the current age, there is a growing need to “modernize” disaster communications as people draw back from traditional media sources and turn to new technologies, like AI.
“If you go and ask your AI, ‘tell me about the earthquake that just happened,’ will it hallucinate?” Jones said. “How do we get out reliable information quickly in a way that gets to people where they’re getting their news now?”
Jones views the center as especially vital in Southern California, where “freeway culture” can make people and institutions feel disconnected to their communities. With the center’s alliance model with local entities, she hopes to change that.
“One of the things I want to do with the alliance is increase the degree of social capital so that the decision makers already know and talk to each other. They obviously try to, because you can’t be a good emergency manager and not recognize the need for this,” Jones said. “But in a region as large as Southern California with so many people, and so many jurisdictions, it becomes really challenging. So what we’re hoping to do here is provide a way where cities can really focus on these issues together.”
The center received a $200,000 startup fund from Caltech. Currently, Jones has a tight staff, working with her deputy director, Dr. Samantha Stanley, who has a background in communications and media, and John Bwarie, who worked with her nonprofit. The long-term funding plan will rely on philanthropic support and funding from alliance members, who will be asked to pay a membership fee.
“The way we (communicate) is always evolving, just because of how society is evolving, how we communicate information, how we respond to impacts of wildfire, earthquakes, climate change,” Zhan said. “I think this is like a really important next step for us to take on some of these new challenges and try to serve the community better with our science.”