'Citizen science', or the participation of 'non-specialists' in the gathering or analysis of scientific data, is playing an increasingly important role in scientific research. It is an excellent way for citizens to contribute to the forecasting and warning of hazards that impact them and could be particularly helpful in low and middle income countries. in these regions, citizen science also has the potential to generate shared understandings of hazardous phenomena, improve communication and help communities at risk take actions to improve their resilience during and after hazardous events. From earlier volcano-related research projects we have evidence that working with communities at risk to gather data and make observations of natural phenomena does help them reduce their risk. It also helps both scientists and community members cope with the uncertainty around hazardous phenomena by helping them to devise strategies that minimise impacts on lives and livelihoods. Researchers working on other hazards have also found this to be the case. There are many challenges in moving from the theory regarding the usefulness of citizen science to the practice of making a project work. What we want to do is (A) understand how we should use 'citizen science' to address these challenges and build resilience to environmental hazards (B) create and nurture an international transdisciplinary community of practice to contribute to future projects (B). We will involve addressing the following objectives: (1) learn lessons and synthesise knowledge from previous citizen science programs and existing initiatives; (2) understand what the barriers to success are with these types of project and try to break them down. We think this means we will have to widen our thinking about citizen science techniques, in new ways. We will incorporate methodologies and techniques from the humanities and we include important lessons from the theory and best practices in international development. We will try to address tensions between 'bottom-up' or community driven practices and 'top-down' or technocratic approaches to gathering data. We will also meet these aims and objectives by using a case study-based approach to frame our thinking about how this will work best for the citizens at risk from environmental hazards. Citizens are at the heart of this project and so we will use conversations with communities in three contrasting study sites (Ecuador, the English-speaking Caribbean and Nepal) to inform our synthesis and critical analysis of the challenges encountered in country. To achieve these aims we have brought together a group of researchers across all relevant fields, and will use our research to create a new community of practice. Each investigator will act as a 'champion' for their specialism to quickly draw together a grouping of experts to attend an initial workshop and we will use the discussion there to inform a synthesis of relevant initiatives and existing evidence. That synthesis will be used to critically reflect on the barriers to success. During this, we will address the tensions between participatory approaches to development focussed on the communities and their empowerment and engagement and more traditional scientific methods driven by the need for knowledge and data coming from the scientists. We will also work to understand the contribution that narratives and narrative analysis bring to the overall goals of 'citizen science' initiatives, and how they might help to equalise relationships within a project. We'll produce an analysis of what might help projects in the future successfully use citizen science to empower communities to deal with natural hazards. We will also increase everyone's knowledge of this field. We will share this analysis with the communities where we work and have designed our case studies to be used by initiatives already in place to increase community resilience in those regions.

Over 50 capital cities of the Least Developed Countries in the world lie on top of faults in regions that are building up significant stresses within the crust. This continually growing stress will eventually lead to future earthquakes. Earthquakes are a natural hazard that are killing an increasing number of people, in part because populations are growing and densifying into urban centres. The recurrence time between earthquakes may be hundreds of years; many cities that are large today were small towns or non-existent in the past when the last big earthquake struck. There is often little social and community memory and first-hand experience of these previous events. Furthermore, urban development in the intervening years has often hidden the expressions of the active earthquake faults beneath and around a city, making them harder to identify today. In the Least Developed Countries, the impact of earthquakes on people's lives and livelihoods is much greater due to the vulnerability of buildings and communities. A major challenge has been to ensure that the mitigation of earthquake risk is a high priority in vulnerable cities, where earthquakes rarely occur but are devastating when they do. This is particularly difficult in cities in the least developed countries, where building earthquake resilience has to be balanced against other economic & social pressures facing cities & their development. We will develop a blueprint for the concept of "Seismic Cities", which we believe will be a powerful approach for raising awareness of the devastating potential of earthquakes in cities & for making them more sustainable & resilient to such shocks. This will be a biennial workshop & event that will bring together a range of stakeholders to target communities vulnerable to seismic hazard, and to develop more sustainable cities that can better cope with future environmental shocks from earthquakes. This will build on an existing successful concept of Cities On Volcanoes-a biennial conference and series of workshops that aims to reduce the impacts of volcanism & its effects on society by understanding volcanic phenomena, recognising the hazards & their impacts on people, emergency management, community education, case histories & risk mitigation. In order to test the effectiveness of our methodological approaches, as well as help develop the Seismic Cities concept, we will target a large city that has recently experience major earthquakes-Santiago in Chile. We will conduct interviews & focus groups with communities in the city to explore their own perceptions of risk & coping strategies. We will also document these experiences through story-telling & sensory mapping of the built environment, & create a virtual archive of these to which the community can add. Through co-production methods such as focus groups, walking trails, mobile interviewing, live projections & tours of both historic & contemporary urban sites, valuable data on the effects of earthquakes & their potential danger will be gathered. We will use satellite imagery to construct a 3D model of the built environment & highlight active fault structures within the city, integrating this with the community resources to better communicate the findings derived from the scientific data. The strategies to best prepare & protect the community can be embedded as community members become responsible for mapping & curating their own lived environments. The long-term (20-year) aim is to raise resilience to earthquake hazard across the whole world to the standards of the US, New Zealand & Japan. This is particularly challenging for many ODA-Recipient countries, where awareness of the threat from earthquakes may be low, & where increasing resilience to earthquake hazard may be a low priority. We envisage Seismic Cities as a flagship, high-profile event that significantly raises awareness in the host city, among both professionals & the public, drawing focus & resources to that city.

Earthquake prediction, (where? how big? and when?) is currently not possible but recent, rapid developments in earthquake science have made progress on identification of regions of high seismic hazard on which mitigating actions and scarce resources can be focused. For many scientists, the goal of earthquake prediction has been superseded by the goal of targeted preparation of at-risk populations. Integrated earthquake science, much of it established and uncontested, has produced effective disaster risk reduction preparedness programmes which can be shown to work. In western Sumatra, for example, the city of Padang lies broadside on to the Mentawai Islands segment of the Sunda megathrust which has been shown to be advanced in its seismic cycle and nearing failure in a large earthquake. This event will likely generate a destructive tsunami and, without preparation, a death toll on the same scale as the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami is thought possible. The population of the city have been the subject of intensive preparedness work based on the current insights from integrated earthquake and tsunami science. On 30 September 2009 an earthquake of magnitude 7.6 hit the city killing some 1200 people. Interestingly, this earthquake ruptured deep in the crust and did not cause any vertical movements of the seafloor and therefore did not generate a tsunami but no one in Padang knew this, it was perfect dry run for the expected earthquake. Later forensic studies of the response of Padang residents show that large numbers of people evacuated the city according to the evacuation plan and many lives would have been saved had the earthquake been tsunamigenic. Unfortunately in developing countries, where the risk to lives is highest, examples of excellent practice in utilising uncontested earthquake science are too rare, and thus avoidable loss of life to earthquakes and their associated hazards is too common. The 12 January 2010 Haiti earthquake is a case in point, here, despite several publications in international earthquake science journals warning of the impending threat of an earthquake of magnitude around 7, the population and NGO's working with them remained completely ignorant of the threat and more than 230000 people died when the earthquake (M=7.1) occurred. We aim to change this balance. In this project we will put together an international team of earthquake scientists, NGO actors and government agencies and develop a large consortium project aimed at the integration and demonstration of cutting-edge, hybrid methods in earthquake science in parallel with the development of partnerships and methodologies for dissemination, utilisation and contextualisation of the best methods for disaster risk reduction programming in developing countries. The consortium project will do cutting-edge applied science by taking the best of current methods from different earthquake science fields, all of which have been shown to work, and combine them to produce protocols to identify regions of highest earthquake hazard. We will then take examples of international best practice, like Padang, in preparedness and work with social scientists and end users in the NGO and government agencies to ensure that the lessons from these examples are learned on a global basis so that the at-risk populations can fully avail of the state-of-the-art earthquake science. To enable appropriate use of earthquake science, the consortium will identify the most effective forms of science policy dialogue and develop innovative approaches which best support the effective communication and application of earthquake science for ARCs. This science policy learning will be of enormous transferable value, enabling learning from across scientific fields concerning future vulnerability to directly inform and support at risk communities.