June 10, 2026 | Categoría: Seminarios
(tomado de csociales.uahurtado.cl)
How can we better prepare for floods, landslides, droughts and other extreme events associated with climate change? That was one of the questions that brought experts from various disciplines together on Tuesday 9 June at the workshop “How can we understand and address hydrometeorological risks through transdisciplinary approaches?”, held at Universidad Alberto Hurtado.
The event gathered representatives from academia, public agencies and companies involved in monitoring, management and emergency response, who agreed on the need to strengthen cooperation between disciplines and actors in order to address increasingly complex risks.
One topic of particular interest was the analysis of climate phenomena with a strong media presence, such as El Niño. Participants discussed how such events are usually communicated to the public, warning of the need to distinguish between scientific evidence and alarmist readings that can distort public understanding of risk.
Research and data were also reviewed that shed light on the relationship — at times more complex than is usually assumed — between large-scale phenomena such as El Niño and particular weather events affecting the country.
“We congratulate Universidad Alberto Hurtado on this initiative. Clearly, everything to do with hydrometeorological risks that directly affect our country will always be important. Climate change is affecting us directly today, and it is therefore incumbent on academia, the public sector and the State to prepare and cooperate in order to take this task forward,” said Miguel Muñoz, regional director for the Metropolitan Region at SENAPRED (Chile’s National Disaster Prevention and Response Service), who opened the event.
The event was organised by the Centre for Studies in Science, Technology and Society (CECTS) at Universidad Alberto Hurtado, together with Imagine-IT and the FONDECYT project “Towards a hydro-sociology of experts: knowledge, objects and practices around water in Chile”.
For Francisco Salinas, director of the UAH Master’s Programme in Science, Technology and Society and principal investigator of the FONDECYT project, one of the meeting’s main contributions was to create spaces for conversation between actors who normally work from different perspectives.
“At CECTS and Universidad Alberto Hurtado we opened up a dialogue between the STEM disciplines and the social sciences on hydrometeorological risks that was remarkably fluid and symmetrical. We held a conversation with representatives of organisations as diverse as the State Railways Company, satellite information firms and SENAPRED,” he said.
The presentations were delivered by specialists addressing topics such as hydrological risks under changing climate scenarios, extreme weather events, socio-environmental vulnerability, satellite observation technologies, urban planning and emergency management.
Alongside the talks, participants learned about research, models and tools developed by different organizations to improve the capacity to anticipate and respond to large-scale hydrometeorological events.
“This event sets out to address meteorological risks from a transdisciplinary perspective, with the aim of improving our understanding of these events and how they interact with multiple actors. We need a shared language that allows us to better confront the challenges facing Chile today and tomorrow in terms of water resilience and extreme events,” said hydrologist Eduardo Muñoz-Castro, researcher at SLF Davos and ETH Zurich.
Against a backdrop of extreme events growing in frequency and intensity, participants agreed that managing hydrometeorological risks requires not only better technical tools but also closer articulation between scientific knowledge, public policy, infrastructure, territorial planning and communities.
List of talks presented
- Hydrological risks in a changing climate
Eduardo Muñoz-Castro (SLF Davos – ETH Zurich) - Extreme weather events
Raúl Valenzuela (Universidad de O’Higgins) - Hydrometeorological events and socio-environmental precarity
Evelyn Arriagada (Universidad Diego Portales) - Geohazards in the age of satellite information
Juan Muga (imagine-it) - Urban planning in the face of hazards
Isadora Arellano (Gearth) - Emergency management
Stephanie Seria (EFE)