At a time when climatic disasters are occurring at an ever-increasing rate, Caroline Rizza offers her views as a researcher on crisis management and the resilience of populations faced with these increasingly violent and recurrent climatic hazards, and on the role that digital technology can play in this.
At the end of 2023, the Council of Europe adopted the recommendations presented by Caroline Rizza on the use of digital technology, and in particular social media and mobile applications, for crisis communication in the context of climate threats. At the same time, she became an associate researcher at the ACROSS laboratory of the Institut de Recherche pour le Développement (IRD) in Hanoi, Vietnam. At the end of April 2025, she was received by the French Ambassador to Indonesia and the Indonesian Minister of Tourism in Jakarta to present the results of her research project entitled ‘Transdisciplinary research strategy on crisis management and population resilience’.
Interview by Isabelle Mauriac
Research that echoes current crises
Yes, and I’ve also been awarded an ANR (Agence Nationale de la Recherche) project aimed at defining a ‘transdisciplinary approach to emerging risks in an area to rethink crisis management in the face of global warming’, which starts in September 2025 and will be carried out in collaboration with two IRD teams in Montpellier and Hanoi, and the industrial engineering team at IMT Mines Albi, with whom I had already collaborated during the previous ANR MACIV on the integration of citizen initiatives emerging on social media during a major event, the companies Emerause and Sildaro specialising in crisis management and public and civil society players including fire and rescue services, the Ministries of Ecological Transition and the Interior and the VISOV association (digital volunteers in emergency management).
Faced with global warming and its impact on any given region, I would like to be able to create a network of trans-disciplinary experts (i.e. both academics and practitioners, but also disciplines combining human sciences, computer sciences, data, technology, etc.) and on an international scale because, as current events demonstrate, a broader view is needed to grasp all the issues at stake. Each discipline, each practitioner, has a complementary view of the problem, and a more appropriate solution is achieved when these sometimes antagonistic visions manage to meet, talk to each other and work together. The projects that I coordinate on regional resilience in the face of global warming are based on the idea that emerging risks in a region, not necessarily new but more violent and more recurrent, require or provide an opportunity to rethink interdepartmental collaboration but also, and perhaps above all, collaboration with citizens during the management of the event. And this can only be done upstream of the crisis.
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