With natural disasters becoming more frequent, further development and disbursement of risk assessment tools and early warning technologies are necessary to mitigate the damage they cause, a leading Japanese researcher on disaster risk reduction has said.

Takako Izumi, an associate professor at Tohoku University, said Sunday that in order for such preventative measures to become globally effective, scientific communities and policymakers must ask themselves how such technologies, including social media and other rapid communication services, can become more readily available in regions with limited resources.

Seventy percent of natural disasters across the world over the past 10 years were considered to be water-related, and the more predictable nature of such disasters compared with some others, such as earthquakes, means the deployment of these technologies can help head off greater damage.

“We are now seeing how (water-related disasters) are happening everywhere, and the intensity and frequency is really increasing,” Izumi said during a panel on disaster prevention at the Nobel Prize Dialogue in Yokohama. “If we continue conventional disaster risk reduction, the situation will not get better.”

Flooding in Pakistan has killed over 1,700 people since June, with heavy monsoon rains and a preceding severe heat wave believed to be linked to climate change, while Germany and neighboring parts of Europe experienced historic rains and flooding in 2021.

Izumi was one of several participants at Sunday’s event either based at or with long-standing ties with Tohoku University in Sendai, an area deeply affected by the 2011 earthquake and subsequent tsunami, which killed almost 20,000 people.

Drawing on her background in humanitarian assistance, disaster risk reduction and development with various U.N. agencies, Izumi spoke of the need to scale up current disaster risk reduction measures and preventative measures to tackle more complex disasters and threats in the future.

Later in the day, 2002 Nobel Chemistry Prize winner Kurt Wuthrich talked about the water-related effects of global warming he has witnessed during a lifetime as an avid skier in his native Switzerland.

“When I was a kid, we would have snow for weeks at a time, but now this is all gone — and that’s a very big change,” he said during an interview. “Areas that were covered by ice and snow have been severely reduced, and the thickness of the glaciers has vanished.”

He pointed to the “enormous” potential consequences of the melting of permafrost — the permanently frozen layer of ice, soil, sand and rock on or beneath the earth’s surface — leading to the release of methane and other greenhouse gasses alongside unfrozen microbes potentially harmful to humans and other animals.

Wuthrich joined Dan Shechtman, Israeli winner of the 2011 Nobel Prize in chemistry, and Konstantin Novoselov, Russian-British winner of the 2010 physics prize, as one of three past Nobel Prize winners who had flown to Japan especially for the event.

Returning after a two-year hiatus following the COVID-19 pandemic, the annual event focused on the subject of water and the ways it shapes life on earth, highlighting the devastating impact water pollution and global warming are having on the natural environment, and the steps being taken to prevent further degradation.