Strengthening Resilience in Volcanic Areas (STREVA) is a four-year project funded by the NERC/ESRC Increasing Resilience to Natural Hazards Programme. It examines the interaction of dynamic factors contributing to disaster risk: the volcanic hazard processes; the exposure and vulnerability of people and assets; and the capacities in place to reduce, prepare for and recover from the impact.

Research will be carried out in the Eastern Caribbean and Latin America led by Dr Jenni Barclay of the University of East Anglia, in collaboration with the Universities of Oxford and Bristol, the British Geological Survey and ODI, and complemented by local research partners. The team will apply learning from three well studied volcanoes with recent eruptions (‘forensic volcanoes’) to three high risk ‘trial volcanoes’ that show signs of unrest but are less well understood, in order to improve knowledge of the ways in which risk factors interact and can be characterised, analysed and monitored.

ODI Climate and Environment Programme (CEP) researchers Tom Mitchell and Emily Wilkinson are responsible for Work Package 4, Assessing and Analysing Institutional Capacity, which uses a political economy approach to explore institutional capacities and incentives to reduce risk. The analysis takes place at different scales, adopting a ‘bottom-up’ approach that seeks to link local capacities and processes to the wider political and economic environment at provincial, national and international levels. WP4 examines three aspects of risk governance in volcanic areas:

• institutional capacity to manage risk effectively and build resilience at multiple scales;
• the circumstances under which political will is created and DRR policy reform takes place, and;
• a comparison of the governance regimes surrounding the three trial volcanoes.

Outputs from this study will include a refined set of tools, methods and indicators of institutional capacity at micro, meso and macro levels; a theory of policy change, identifying catalytic events/processes and constraints; and the creation of a typology of risk governance regimes.