Key Information
Year:
2021Education Establishment:
University College LondonName of Chair Lead:
Professor Dina D’AyalaThis UNESCO Chair develops effective methods to assess and mitigate risks from natural hazards to existing and new school infrastructure, contributing to improved equitable access to safe learning environment for children in vulnerable communities, ensuring continuity of education services and reducing life losses. The Chair has created a community for resilience engineering exceeding 3,000 members from more than 100 countries, instrumental in sharing knowledge to support disaster risk reduction initiatives.
The work of this Chair
Education underpins every aspect of the UN Sustainable Development Goals, and safer and resilient schools are an essential prerequisite of continued quality education. Creating in-country expertise to deliver resilient socio-technical systems is therefore key to the delivery of community sustainability in the medium term.
Today, 90% of urban expansion occurs in developing countries, near sources of natural hazards, in unplanned settlements, lacking infrastructure and exacerbating risks to residents and quality of life. Safer and resilient schools and critical infrastructure reduce the immediate adverse impacts of hazards, facilitate rapid response and recovery phases, and lead to better continuity of education, reducing collateral risks such as child labour, child marriage and exploitation. Good quality infrastructure supports growth and sustainable development; hence the Chair activities contributes to meet the Disaster Risk Reduction commitment as a prerequisite for sustainable development.
The Chair research the use of AI to mitigate education interruption caused by natural hazards, with implementations in the Dominican Republic and the Philippines. To improve school access equity, the Chair works on environmental comfort and WASH, using on-site data collection and numerical environmental modelling. A webinar series established in 2022, counting more than 25 webinars, in collaboration with worldwide academic institutions and engineering companies, disseminates best resilience engineering practice.
About the Chair Lead
Professor D’Ayala is the UNESCO Chair in Disaster Risk Reduction and Resilience Engineering at UCL. She is Professor of Structural Engineering within the Department of Civil, Environmental and Geomatic Engineering. She is Co-Director of the UCL EPICentre and Co-Director of the StrEnTHE, the Structural and Environmental Laboratory at UCL HERE EAST.
She is Fellow of the ICE, and was director of the International Association of Earthquake Engineers. Her specialism is Structural Resilience Engineering with particular emphasis on the assessment, strengthening, preservation and resilience of existing buildings, structures, transport infrastructure and architectural heritage. She has developed FaMIVE for the past 20 years.
Resources related to the work of this Chair
Minimize education disruption following natural hazards, Dominican Republic
A decision-making framework for school infrastructure improvement programs
Bayesian networks for assessment of disruption to school systems under combined hazards
GLOSI taxonomy: A tool for ‘seismic risk assessment’ oriented classification of school buildings
