From Devastation to Resilience: Integrating Engineering, Clinical Trauma Care, and Public Health to Mitigate the Civilian Impact of Explosive Weapons
In today’s world…
Urban areas have increasingly become centres for intense conflicts, often resulting in the use of explosive weapons in populated areas (EWIPA). The aftermath of such events is not just structural damage but profound impacts on human lives and health systems. Our vision as the IBRN is to reduce this unnecessary suffering significantly.
Members of the IBRN have submitted a groundbreaking proposal that would delve into this critical issue, focusing on understanding and mitigating the effects of EWIPA, with the goal of saving lives and improving the resilience of communities and healthcare systems.
We believe in better understanding blast characteristics (e.g. fireball effects and pressure loads) within an urban context, and using this to improve the understanding of injury mechanisms, identifying new health system responses, and building physical and systems resilience.
A central challenge is the lack of data and models to predict the effects of explosive weapons on civilians and infrastructure. This gap in understanding of how different factors, such as the type of explosives and urban layout, contribute to the extent of physical damage, health system response and harm to civilian communities makes disaster planning and construction of more resilient infrastructure challenging.
Our interdisciplinary research project will:
Use interdisciplinary case studies to study past explosive events and create a robust evidence base.
Build advanced models that can predict the blast effects and the resulting injuries at both the urban and building levels.
Assess the impact of EWIPA on health systems, focusing on how to prepare and respond more effectively.
Integrate these insights into guidelines for disaster planning, construction of resilient infrastructures, and medical response strategies.
Our detailed Gantt chart shows what the first two years of this groundbreaking research project would look like. Although ambitions, we have an established track record of collaborating across disciplinary boundaries towards our common goal of understanding and reducing the civilian harm caused by explosive weapons. As the IBRN, we are highly motivated to deliver as much as possible to the goal of understanding and reducing civilian harm in EWIPA events.
