A workshop on “Managing compound hazards and cascading disasters in the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta, California” was held on 17 December 2024 with the goal to discuss how cascading risks are addressed in literature and in practice. In this workshop a group of researchers, practitioners and policy-makers from the federal, state and local agencies reviewed and discussed how this concept is interpreted in different disciplines and contexts.
The workshop had the goal to identify pressing challenges from cascading risk and create a framework addressing them. The workshop agenda was designed to discussion of the topics that were initially developed by the CCRM CRISES Team Project in relation to catastrophic risk, with special interest on better understanding governance challenges, existing catastrophic risk data and models and current approaches for community engagement.
The workshop, which was organized by the CCRM CRISES Project team and facilitated by Anna Serra-Llobet and Adda Athanasopoulos-Zekkos, was divided into two panels. The morning panel was focused on the California Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta, a complex system that is particularly at risk due to seismic risk to the over 1,100 miles of levees protecting lands subsided below sea level. The afternoon panel focused on how to address and manage cascading risk more generally, with particular interest on how we assess and manage compound hazards and cascading disasters.
Thanks to the participants who made this workshop a success: Phil Beilin (FEMA), Michael Bishop (FEMA), John Cain (River Partners), Noelle Chin (UC Berkeley), Stephen Collier (UC Berkeley), Robin Fennig (Cal OES), Howard Foster (UC Berkeley), Catherine Freeman (California State Association of Counties), Adam Klein (FEMA), Todd R. LaPorte (UC Berkeley), Xing Liu (FEMA), Jay Lund (UC Davis), Michael Mierzwa (Cal DWR), Brett Milligan (UC Davis), Matt Munoz (Cal OES), Jason Needham (U.S. Army Corps of Engineers), Gabriela Paredes Vega (UC Berkeley), Ricardo Pineda (Cal DWR), Paul Schulman (Northeastern University), and Mark Wingate (FEMA).