“All roads lead to Rome” or what started with checking my e-mail, resulted in spending hours browsing the internet

Today was a perfect day to deal with my overload of private e-mail. Very soon I arrived at several e-mails from PreventionWeb. PreventionWeb is for me the source of information regarding disaster risk reduction and supplies me with lots of interesting links to valuable information, especially with respect to my field of interest, resilience. The first PreventionWeb e-mail contained a link to the FP7 Cooperation Work Programme 2011 with Theme 6 – Environment, Activity 6.1 Climate Change, pollution and risks, Sub-Activity 6.1.3 Natural Hazards, Area 6.1.3.2.Vulnerability assessment and societal impacts, ENV.2011.1.3.2-1 Building societal resilience to disasters in Europe (time to take a breath again). Results of this theme should be concepts and methods to define and measure the resilience of a society to disasters, exactly the theme that is just in my line.
Did I know what the consequence of reading this particular e-mail for the rest of my day would be? No! Curious about opportunities within the scope of this FP7 programme I started to look for information on the Cordis website of the European commission. Well, let’s says, it took me some time to final arrive to the conclusion that there were currently no calls for Environment. However, I could continue my quest of the day via two projects that started in 2008, MOVE and ENSURE, framed within the topic “Frame for better vulnerability assessment”. These projects mainly referred to vulnerability as key concept but to a limited amount resilience was also mentioned, especially when the Hygo Framework for Action is quoted: “culture of disaster resilience”. Although the projects are already running for 2 years and specific websites are created, there are not many results available yet. But running another sweep over the internet, brought me to another FP7 project, called CapHaz-Net, Social Capacity Building for Natural Hazards – Towards More Resilient Societies. Very interesting project when reviewing their main research question “How can we enhance the capacities of European societies to prepare for, cope with and recover from the negative impacts of a ›natural‹ hazard?” and their outcomes, like the work packages reports on for instance “Risk perception and natural hazards”. One of my first steps in such cases is to skim through the report and take a look at the literature. And it is always nice to see familiar publications amongst the authors referred to, like for example “Risk Society” of Ulrich Beck.
But do all roads lead to Rome? Was it the hours worth spending on internet and then to realize that you arrive at the same “spot”? Yes, it was, because the different roads show different beautiful surroundings of interesting areas and make my view upon the world of risk, vulnerability and resilience more complete.
Are there no drawbacks? Maybe one; the number of e-mails in my inbox did not reduce during the last couple of hours…