The Global Forum on Science and Technology for Disaster Resilience was held in Tokyo from 23 to 25 November 2017 with 228 participants from 42 countries. To implement the priorities for action in the Sendai Framework for Disaster Risk Reduction (DRR) 2015–2030, the Forum aimed to encourage all stakeholders to develop guidelines for supporting national platforms for DRR by making the best use of science and technology and producing a synthesis report on disaster science and technology.

During the Forum, seven working groups held presentations and panel discussions that corresponded to the four priorities for action in the Sendai Framework (1. Understanding disaster risk; 2. Strengthening disaster risk governance; 3. Investing in DDR; and 4. “Build Back Better”), as well as on Interdisciplinary collaboration, National platforms, and Synthesis report.

At the end of the Forum, seven policy briefs, as well as “Tokyo Statement 2017,” were adopted. In this special issue of the Journal of Disaster Research, co-chairs of the working groups summarize their discussions and recommendations for each working group. Additional papers on the role of private sectors and Nation’s Synthesis are also included in the issue.

We thank all the authors and reviewers of the papers, as well as all the participants of the Forum for their valuable contributions.

The World Bosai Forum was held at the Sendai International Center and Kawauchi Hagi Hall, Tohoku University, bringing together 947 participants from over 42 countries. This was nearly double the number of participants that we had initially expected. Proactive and meaningful discussions were held by a wide range of officials and experts from domestic and overseas industries, governments, academia, and private sectors, as well as by local citizens. From our partnership with the Asian Conference on Urban Disaster Reduction (ACUDR) and International Symposium on New Technologies for Urban Safety of Mega Cities in Asia (USMCA), we had a total of 126 participants.

We successfully created a platform for building international cooperation to share and resolve the current situation and handle various challenges for Bosai or disaster risk reduction. Practical and effective discussions have contributed to raising and promoting awareness of Bosai and the Sendai Framework 2015–2030 to the world from Sendai. Our first World Bosai Forum was concluded with productive outcomes, and its future meetings will be held every 2 years.

The guest editors of this special issue are pleased to publish valuable academic papers presented at the first World Bosai Forum. As you may notice, this research stems from a wide variety of current issues. The nature of interdisciplinary approaches may be unique to the World Bosai Forum, and the guest editors hope that this special issue will contribute to enhanced recognition of the Forum.

This special issue presents the findings obtained so far by the relevant studies that have been conducted mainly at the Global Centre for Disaster Statistics (GCDS), which is affiliated with the International Research Institute of Disaster Science (IRIDeS) at Tohoku University, Japan.

The establishment of the GCDS was jointly announced by the United Nations Development Program (UNDP) and the IRIDeS in March 2015 during the Third UN World Conference on Disaster Risk Reduction (UNWCDRR) in Sendai, Japan. The Centre is expected to contribute greatly to sustainable development, based on risk-informed policy making, through the following activities: providing scientific analyses and technical advice based on their disaster loss and damage data, supporting the United Nations International Strategy for Disaster Reduction (UNISDR) and individual countries in the work of monitoring the progress of the Sendai Framework for Disaster Risk Reduction (SFDRR) and the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development, and providing policy advice to build the capacities of national/local governments, based on their demands.

In this context, the guest editors of this special issue are pleased to publish valuable academic articles closely related to the GCDS’ activities that contribute to the development of disaster statistics. As Sasaki and Ono (2018) observed, there exist three major categories of research questions that contribute to the development of disaster statistics: investigation into disaster statistics and/or global disaster-related databases, development of the existing discipline-based research, and analysis of various issues through questionnaire surveys.

Last but not least, it is our hope that this special issue contributes to the literature of disaster statistics and accelerates its development.

The National Research Institute for Earth Science and Disaster Resilience (NIED) is working on three tasks: predicting disasters, preventing damage, and realizing speedy reconstruction and recovery efforts in the event of natural disasters such as earthquakes, tsunamis, volcanic eruptions, landslides, torrential rains, blizzards, and ice storms.

In the last two years of the NIED’s fourth mid/long term plan period, which began in 2016, the 2016 Kumamoto earthquake (M6.5 and M7.3), the heavy rainfall in the Northern Kyushu District in July 2017, and the heavy rain event of July 2018 are listed as “named” disasters, named by Japan Meteorological Agency. In addition, there were other disasters: an avalanche accident on Nasudake in 2017, an earthquake (M6.1) with its epicenter in northern Osaka, an eruption of Kirishimayama (Shinmoedake and Ioyama) and a phreatic eruption of Kusatsu-Shiranesan in 2018.

The results of research done on the above-mentioned disasters and the latest results of ongoing projects in each research division and center were compiled as the second NIED special issue of the Journal of Disaster Research (JDR). In this special issue, we are delighted to present ten papers on three topics: climatic disasters, seismic disasters, and integrated research on disaster risk reduction. In particular, this special issue contains three papers on the above-mentioned heavy rainfall in the Northern Kyushu District in July 2017 and two papers related to the Kumamoto earthquake.

Although the achievements detailed in these papers are the results of individual research, the NIED hopes that these results as a whole will be fully utilized to promote science and technology for disaster risk reduction and resilience. The NIED hopes that this special issue awakens the readers’ interest in new research and, of course, creates an opportunity for further collaborative works with us.

The Science and Technology Research Partnership for Sustainable Development (SATREPS) is a Japanese government program that promotes international joint research. The program is structured as a collaboration between the Japan Science and Technology Agency (JST) and the Japan International Cooperation Agency (JICA). The program includes various fields, such as Environment and Energy, Bioresources, Disaster Prevention and Mitigation, and Infectious Disease Control, and a total 52 projects were currently in progress as of May, 2018.

It is expected that the promotion of international joint research under this program will enable Japanese research institutions to conduct research more effectively in fields and having targets that make it advantageous to do that research in developing countries, including countries in Latin America and the Caribbean, Asia, and Africa.

Recently, SATREPS projects in the field of Infectious Disease have been but under the control of the Japan Agency for Medical Research and Development (AMED). Although adult maladies, such as malignant tumors, heart disease, and cerebral apoplexy, are major causes of death in the developed countries including Japan, infectious diseases are still responsible for the high mortality rates in developing countries. Therefore, Infectious Disease Control is the important field of SATREPS.

Infectious Disease Control projects are progressing in several countries, including Kenya, Zambia, Bangladesh, the Philippines, and Brazil, and various infectious diseases and pathogens have been targeted.

In this special issue on Infectious Disease Control, the following reports from three projects have been selected: “The JICA-AMED SATREPS Project to Control Outbreaks of Yellow Fever and Rift Valley Fever in Kenya” by Nagasaki University, “Comprehensive Etiological and Epidemiological Study on Acute Respiratory Infections in Children in the Philippines” by Tohoku University, and “International Joint Research on Antifungal Resistant Fungi in Brazil” by Chiba University. These projects include viral, bacterial, and fungal...<more>

The Global Navigation Satellite System (GNSS) has been utilized in a variety of research fields within the geosciences. This research has been further developed for application to hazard monitoring and natural disaster mitigation. Some developments have even been implemented in society in countermeasures against natural disasters. The Geospatial Information Authority of Japan (GSI), for example, has established a nationwide GNSS network called GEONET. The data from GEONET are used extensively among researchers and practitioners, not only for basic research but also for the development of methods and systems that can mitigate disasters. This special volume is a collection of articles that discuss how such methods and systems are now being developed and/or planned to both clarify the mechanisms behind natural hazards and mitigate the damage they may cause. The volume consists of 13 papers covering a wide range of natural phenomena, such as earthquakes, crustal movements, tsunamis, ionospheric disturbances, and volcanic eruptions. Some papers help us to understand how natural hazards behave, which should be the first step toward disaster mitigation. On the other hand, other articles report direct efforts made toward providing early warnings of impending disasters. Disaster mitigation systems may require real-time (and even kinematic with high-rate data sampling) processing and dissemination of data. Moreover, some applications involve data collection from coastal waters and the open sea. Now that the density of GNSS stations has approached saturation on land, the scarcity of data collected offshore will have to be rectified through the development of GNSS systems in the ocean. We do hope that this volume will be a step in the further progress of utilizing GNSS for disaster monitoring and mitigation in the future to make society safer and more secure.

The 2011 Great East Japan Earthquake and Tsunami Disaster left behind many lessons to learn, and there have since been many new findings and insights that have led to suggestions made and implemented in disaster observation, sensing, simulation, and damage determination. The challenges for mitigating the damage from future catastrophic natural disasters, such as the Tokyo Metropolitan Earthquake or the Nankai Trough Earthquake and Tsunami, are in how we share our visions of the possible impacts, how we prepare to mitigate the losses and damages, and how we enhance society’s disaster resilience.

The huge amount of information obtained, called “disaster big data,” is related to the dynamic movement, as IoT, of a large number people, vehicles, and goods from inside and outside the affected areas. This has dramatically facilitated our understanding of how our society has responded to unprecedented catastrophes. The key question is how to utilize big data in establishing social systems that respond promptly, sensibly, and effectively to natural disasters, and in withstanding adversity with resilience.

Researchers with various types of expertise are working together under a collaborative project called JST CREST “Establishing the advanced disaster reduction management system by fusion of real-time disaster simulation and big data assimilation.” The project aims to identify possible earthquake and tsunami disaster scenarios that occur and progress in a chained or compound manner and to create new technologies to lead responses and disaster mitigation measures to help society to recover from disasters.

As we have published two previous special issues entitled “Disaster and Big Data” since 2016, this issue is our third. Included are 14 papers that aim to share the recent progress of the project as the sequel to Part 2, published in March 2017. As one of the guest editors of this issue, I would like to express our deep gratitude for the insightful comments and suggestions made by the reviewers and the members of the editorial committee. I do hope that this work will...<more>

This special issue summarizes the main results of the first half of the five-year SATREPS project in Myanmar. SATREPS stands for “Science and Technology Research Partnership for Sustainable Development” and it is supported by the Japan International Cooperation Agency (JICA) and the Japan Science and Technology Agency (JST). The title of our project is “Construction of Myanmar Disaster Response Enhancement System and Industry-Academia-Government Cooperation Platform.” Ours is the first SATREPS project in Myanmar and Yangon Technological University (YTU) is our main counterpart institute and relevant organizations mainly national and local governments are collaborating as strategic partners.

In Myanmar, rural and urban development has been progressing rapidly and on a large scale, and the expansion of urban population coupled with climate change has increased the risk of disaster to a critical level, especially in Yangon, Myanmar’s largest city. By monitoring changes in the urban environment, such as the topography, ground, buildings, and infrastructure, we seek to lower the level of risk. Our project will improve the disaster management system, plan and response capability, based on an evaluation of disaster vulnerabilities. Considering floods including tidal wave problems and earthquakes as the target hazards, we aim to contribute to the development of precise regional development plans and disaster management measures by identifying disaster risks in advance, and we will support the Myanmar government in strengthening its disaster response capabilities.

We plan to set up a system by which industry, academia, and the government collaborate to promote the understanding of research content, to continue research activities, and to implement research results in Myanmar. We hope that our activities in the SATREPS project will become an ideal model for solving issues in urban development and disaster management, and that the project will also contribute the other Asian countries.

Hazard and risk researchers are using their research results to target several vastly different stakeholders: the scientific community, governmental institutions, engineers and the larger technical community, companies, and finally the local residents. Each of these groups has a different focus on the results and is drawing different conclusions from them. In this special issue for the Journal of Disaster Research (JDR), we address the problems surrounding hazard and risk communication by asking important questions. How can we communicate hazard and/or risk to the public? How can we involve communities in risk assessment? How can we raise the acceptance of risk models in communities? How can communities be involved in mitigation measures? Finally, how can we explain the inherit uncertainties of hazard and risk assessments? To answer these questions, it is essential to integrate knowledge from the social sciences, natural sciences, and engineering.

As the first step in this effort, we selected seven papers in the present special issue: six are related to the 2016 Kumamoto earthquakes in Japan and one to a research in Taiwan. They include studies on hazard and risk estimates before the disaster, risk communication during the earthquake sequence by the Japan Metrological Agency, the psychological and behavioral characteristics of disaster victims, resident evacuation patterns, the recovery process, and risk communication in disaster. The paper of the research in Taiwan addresses the importance of resident involvement to earthquake science for disaster preparedness.

In April 2016, our institute, NIED, under its new English name the “National Research Institute for Earth Science and Disaster Resilience,” commenced its fourth mid-to-long term planning period, set to last seven years.

We are constantly required to carry out comprehensive efforts, including observations, forecasts, experiments, assessments, and countermeasures related to a variety of natural disasters, including earthquakes, tsunamis, volcanic eruptions, landslides, heavy rains, blizzards, and ice storms.

Since this is NIED’s first special issue for the Journal of Disaster Research (JDR), works were collected on a wide variety of topics from research divisions and centers as well as from ongoing projects in order to give an overview of the latest achievements of the institute. We are delighted to present 17 papers on five topics: seismic disasters, volcanic disasters, climatic disasters, landslide disasters, and the development of comprehensive Information Communications Technology (ICT) for disaster management. Even though the achievements detailed in these papers are certainly the results individual research, NIED hopes to maximize these achievements for the promotion of science and technology for disaster risk reduction and resilience as a whole. It is our hope that this special issue awakens the readers’ interest in a study, and, of course, creates an opportunity for further collaborative works with us.

As our daily lives and socioeconomic activities have increasingly come to depend on information systems and networks, the impact of disruptions to these systems and networks have also become more complex and diversified.

In urban areas, where people, goods, money, and information are highly concentrated, the possibility of chain failures and confusion beyond our expectations and experience is especially high.

The vulnerabilities in our systems and networks on have become the targets of cyber attacks, which have come to cause socioeconomic problems with increasing likelihood. To counter these attacks, technological countermeasures alone are insufficient, and countermeasures such as the development of professional skills and organizational response capabilities as well as the implementation of cyber security schemes based on public-private partnerships (PPP) at the national level must be carried out as soon as possible.

In this JDR mini special issue on Cyber Security, I have tried to expand the scope of traditional cyber security discussions with mainly technological aspects. I have also succeeded in including non-technological aspects to provide feasible measures that will help us to prepare for, respond to, and recover from socioeconomic damage caused by advancing cyber attacks.

Finally, I am truly grateful for the authors’ insightful contributions and the referees’ acute professional advice, which together make this JDR mini special issue a valuable contribution to making our society more resilient to incoming cyber attacks.

Japan has one of the highest levels of seismicity in the world. In the last few decades, Japan has been the site of many destructive earthquakes, such as the 1995 Kobe earthquake, 2003 Tokachi-oki earthquake, 2004 Chuetsu earthquake, 2007 Chuetsu-oki earthquake, and 2016 Kumamoto earthquake/Tottori-chubu earthquakes.

Furthermore, we need to take disaster mitigation countermeasures in preparation for the next Nankai Trough megathrust earthquake, Tokyo earthquake, etc. Disaster countermeasures against these earthquakes will be of vital importance to Japanese society in the future.

As a specific example, if and when the next Nankai Trough megathrust earthquake strikes, it will cause widespread and compound disasters on the island of Shikoku and in southwestern Japan in general. The prefectures of Kagawa, Tokushima, Kochi, and Ehime are all on the island of Shikoku, yet the damages that a future Nankai Trough megathrust earthquake will cause are predicted to be quite different in each prefecture. Therefore, in preparing disaster mitigation strategies for the coming Nankai Trough megathrust earthquake, these four prefectures and the distinguished universities involved in disaster mitigation research and education in them must be united in collaboration while making the best use of the individual characteristics of the prefectures and universities.

Specifically, in terms of disaster mitigation preparations, universities on Shikoku have to develop and advance resilience science as it relates to upcoming disasters from a Nankai Trough megathrust earthquake, inland earthquakes, typhoons, floods, etc.

In this special issue, many significant research papers from the fields of engineering, geoscience, and the social sciences by researchers from distinguished universities on the island of Shikoku focus on resilience science. We must apply their findings to society, putting them into practice to mitigate potential damages from any future natural events.

At 9:26 pm on April 14, 2016, a magnitude 6.5 earthquake struck directly beneath Kumamoto prefecture, Japan, producing a seismic intensity level (JMA) of 7 in Mashiki Town. Although the earthquake damage forecasting system in operation at the time predicted that this earthquake would cause no damage, it resulted in extensive human casualties and property damage centered in Mashiki Town. Past midnight on April 16, 28 hours after the first shock, the second and main shock hit, which recorded magnitude 7.3 and was the strongest recorded urban earthquake in Japan since 1995. The hypocenter extended from Kumamoto prefecture to Oita prefecture, cutting across the island of Kyushu. Mount Aso also saw increased volcanic activities which led to several landslides. This resulted in the collapse of the Great Aso Bridge, an important transportation point, causing the loss of human lives as well as obstruction of traffic for an extended period. Much confusion arose in the process of implementing measures in response to the earthquakes, which produced damage in urban areas as well as hilly and mountainous regions, raising many issues and prompting several new approaches.

Researchers in many fields have conducted various activities at the disaster sites in the one-year period following the earthquakes, and produced significant findings in many areas. In order to make these results available to the wider global community, JDR is releasing a special issue on the 2016 Kumamoto Earthquakes with excellent papers and reports to mark their one-year anniversary. While the submitted papers to this special issue went through our regular peer review process, no publication charge was imposed so as to encourage as many submissions as possible.

It is our hope that this special issue will contribute to throwing light on the 2016 Kumamoto Earthquakes in its entirety.

In March 2015, the Third World Conference on Disaster Risk Reduction adopted the Sendai Framework for Disaster Risk Reduction with a two-part goal: to prevent new and reduce existing disaster risks through the implementation of integrated and inclusive measures that prevent and reduce hazard exposure and vulnerability to disaster, and to increase preparedness for response and recovery, thus strengthening resilience. The first priority for action was given to ”understanding disaster risk,” including focusing on the collection and use of data, risk assessment, disaster prevention education, and awareness raising. The stance of emphasizing science and technology was clearly expressed.

In September 2015, the UN Summit meeting adopted the 17 goals of the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development. Four of the 17 goals include targets related to disaster prevention and mitigation, which has given rise to active discussions over measurement methods and indicators for the targets. The Paris Conference of the UN Climate Change Conference (COP21), held from the end of November to early December 2015, placed an emphasis on the importance of science and technology in both mitigation and adaptation.

In light of these international discussions and their outcomes, we called for papers on the following three topics for this special edition featuring water disasters.

• (1) Prevention of new water disaster risks: rainfall prediction, flood and drought prediction, river bed change prediction, climate change, land use plans, etc.
• (2) Reduction of existing water disaster risks: disaster data and statistics, risk monitoring, risk assessment, etc.
• (3) Resilience reinforcement and inclusive measures: disaster recovery, risk communication, competence development, etc.

Nineteen papers were applied to this special issue. All papers were peer reviewed, and sixteen papers are included herein. We received invaluable comments and suggestions for all applications from the points of view of various fields from many experts in Japan and overseas. We would like to express our gratitude for these.