Juha I. Uitto (Director, Independent Evaluation Office of the GEF) was invited to the "Meet the Author" session of the Annual Natural Hazards Research and Applications Workshop where he presented the books Evaluating Climate Change Action for Sustainable Development, edited by Juha I. Uitto, Jyotsna Puri, and Rob D. van den Berg (Springer 2017), and Sustainable Development and Disaster Risk Reduction, edited by Juha I. Uitto and Rajib Shaw (Springer 2016). As both books explicitly bridge the fields of climate change, sustainable development, environmental hazards and disaster risk management, they generated significant interest among the participants.
The Workshop's theme was "Knowledge to Action: Reducing Hazards Losses and Promoting Disaster Resilience". There were more than 500 participants from federal and local government agencies, academia and private sector. The Workshop also attracted international participants, including from Australia, China, India, Japan, Korea, New Zealand, and the Latin American countries.