There are opportunities to harness innovative research and methods from academic, public policy and commercial stakeholders to further improve the confidence and appropriateness of models and methods for natural hazard risk management. Developments in natural hazard risk assessments have also led to a significant augmentation and improvement of the quantitative analysis of geo-hazard, weather and climate models used by each discipline.

Therefore, this session intends to highlight risk assessment challenges common to all risk practitioners. In particular, we would welcome contributions that focus on:
• the problem of data; its quality, availability, accuracy, suitability and role in determining uncertainty when used in Natural Hazard Risk Assessment.
• the development of common modelling practises and applications for climate and geo-hazard risk assessment that combine innovative approaches and best practice from each of the public policy, disaster risk management and financial risk transfer communities.

This session is particularly timely and topical following COP15 in Copenhagen, which proposes to link Disaster Risk Reduction (DRR) and Risk Transfer as a key element and as an effective international response to Climate Change. It is also directly applicable to the natural hazard modelling community, which shows increased appetite for and scrutiny of more open source initiatives such as Global Earthquake Model (GEM). We encourage submissions from both the social sciences and natural sciences and the presentation of new research, with the intention of stimulating multi-, cross-, and interdisciplinary, debate and discussion.