Some three years have passed since the Great East Japan Earthquake. The symposium will offer opportunities to exchange expertise from academic perspectives including engineering, agriculture, and medicine, examining the way in which infrastructure such as water and sewerage services, waste disposal facilities, and essential utilities has been successfully restored and rehabilitated in Japan, while also examining methods of public health maintenance in urban areas during emergency situations.

Objective evaluations of unresolved issues will be put forth from an international and academic standpoint. With this aim in mind, the 20th Kyoto University International Symposium has been planned in association with the Risk, Perception and Response Conference at Harvard University (Boston, USA). The symposium brings together speakers from interdisciplinary fields dealing with health risk, ranging from economics and psychology, to medicine, health sciences, agriculture, and engineering. Establishing a cooperative network with USA-based specialists will provide opportunities to offer solutions to post-earthquake tasks, which are under accelerated discussion in fields somewhat removed from the academic field. In particular, a special session dealing with the risks associated with the Great East Japan Earthquake has been scheduled for the end of the symposium, where the latest research findings on the Great East Japan Earthquake disaster will be announced by Kyoto University, a leading institution in the field of health risk.

In the past, Kyoto University and Harvard School of Public Health have co-hosted the 19th Kyoto University International Symposium: Health Concerns in the Wake of the Tohoku Triple Disaster in addition to participating in a nano-symposium focused on extensive research, where their collaborative findings were announced. Through the acceleration of joint symposia and collaborative research with Harvard University, the world leader in interdisciplinary studies of risk, Kyoto University aims to become the base and pioneer for risk studies in Japan and the greater Asian region.