Natural disasters are major threats worldwide, with earthquakes and tsunamis presenting major obstacles to sustainable development, especially in Asia-Pacific countries. Natural hazards must be understood and social resilience improved to reduce the risks of disaster. Because earthquakes and tsunamis are rare but devastating events, data must be collected on a global scale, making international collaboration is inevitable for reducing loss due to these events.
A new international research program called the Science and Technology Research Partnership for Sustainable Development (SATREPS) started in 2008 jointly sponsored by the Japan Science and Technology Agency (JST) and the Japan International Cooperation Agency (JICA). Our proposal, entitled Enhancement of Earthquake and Tsunami Disaster Mitigation Technology in Peru, was designated as one of the projects in the field of natural disaster prevention in April 2009. Since this project officially started in March 2010, the research program has been promoted by five groups – seismic motion and geotechnical, tsunami, buildings, spatial information database and damage assessment, and disaster mitigation planning – through the strong collaboration of Peruvian and Japanese researchers and stakeholders.
Midway through the project, we decided to publish our research results in the form of English technical papers so that a wide and global range of researchers and practitioners could take advantage of our findings.
This special issue of the Journal of Disaster Research contains 15 articles – an overview of the project and its progress and 14 peer-reviewed papers covering aspects ranging from earthquake and tsunami hazards to risk reduction.
We extend our sincere thanks to all of the contributors and reviewers involved with these articles. We would further deeply appreciate feedback from readers on these papers to prepare for a second special JDR volume on this project within the next two years.
MISSION-ORIENTED RESEARCH PROGRAM I: ESTABLISHMENT OF A KNOWLEDGE SYSTEM ON SAFETY AND DEVELOPMENT OF DESIGN METHODS OF SCIENCE AND TECHNOLOGY FOR SOCIETY (PRELIMINARY REPORT)