Lessons learned from recent disasters in Japan and future disaster countermeasures

Due to global warming, meteorological disasters, such as typhoons increasing scale and frequency, heavy rain, heavy snow, and drought, heat waves and cold waves have been becoming severer. Furthermore, in Japan, the damage caused by Tokyo metropolitan inland earthquake and that by a gigantic earthquake along the Nankai Trough, both of which have been threatened for a long time, are expected to be "national critical disasters" that will affect the survival of the country. While, considering the current financial situation, and social characteristics of declining birthrate and population, and aging society, it can be said that efforts to deal with future mega-disasters will be “an all-out effort on the way to be poorer.” Moreover, as it is difficult to recover and reconstruct only by post-disaster countermeasures, it is essential to implement risk reduction measures using effectively the time until a hazard strikes, such as strengthening vulnerable buildings and facilities and guiding the population from areas with high disaster risk to those with low disaster risk.

In my talk, lessons learned from the recent disasters in Japan, such as the 2011 Great East Japan Earthquake and Tsunami disaster and the 2016 Kumamoto Earthquake disaster, and how disaster countermeasures should be in Japan in the future will be introduced.