Creating an interdisciplinary environment for training early career scientists in natural hazards

Climate change, globalization, urbanization and increased interconnectedness between physical, human and technical systems pose major challenges to disaster risk reduction, and natural hazards and disaster research. This calls for novel scientific approaches and new data collections between the natural hazards paradigm and the vulnerability paradigm. Such interdisciplinary problem-solving approaches requires collaboration between multiple disciplines, which also increases the need to introduce interdisciplinary curriculum into higher education within natural hazard research. But, how can we construct a course of study that involve students to adopt interdisciplinary practices and interact across disciplines? The Centre of Natural Hazards and Disaster Science (CNDS) in Sweden, is an interdisciplinary research centre that gathers earth-, engineering- and social scientists to work on understanding coupled human-nature systems and reciprocal feedback mechanisms between natural hazards and sociotechnical vulnerability. The centre also has a strong focus on training early career scientists in interdisciplinary natural hazards research, both through its research school and its international summer school for PhD students. Here we share our experience in training the next generation of early career scientists in the nexus of natural hazards and sociotechnical vulnerability, and present the challenges and opportunities of teaching natural hazards in an interdisciplinary setting.