New Blog alert: Stories from a volcano cat modeller

"More than a billion people around the world live less than 150 km from an active volcano, which puts them at direct risk from volcanic eruptions."

This is how I start almost all my presentations nowadays, be it to new colleagues, potential partners or clients. I do that, because I follow the most important rule for presentations: motivate your audience! And while videos of lava flows or big explosions have always been enough to motivate anyone in a lay audience about my outreach talks, it may need a bit more to convince people in the insurance industry that what I have to say is worth their while.

Everyone (with a minimum amount of brain cells) knows that our planet, its ecosystem and humanity with it is threatened by climate change and its induced hazards. Many natural hazards are frequently on the news and no one doubts that we need to think about risk transfer, early warning, and mitigation measures for these situations.

Volcanic eruptions, however, seem more elusive. If they don't happen to live near a volcano (and sometimes even if they do!), people seem not aware of volcanic risk or are happy to ignore it. Most people are very surprised when I tell them that, at any moment, 20-40 volcanoes on this planet are usually actively erupting (see here: https://www.volcanodiscovery.com/daily-map-of-active-volcanoes.html).

So, one of my professional missions is to spread the word. First of all, because I care about those communities directly affected by volcanoes. And secondly, because if it's big enough, an eruption could actually affect us all. Anyone remember Eyjafjallaj?kull? And that one wasn't even that big.

In the past, I have written articles for websites, presented in museums, schools and kindergartens, gave interviews in tv and radio. So now I thought - why not use one space for all the word chaos that my brain apparently likes to set loose in the world?

Long story short: Welcome to my new blog! It will be about volcanoes (ha!), volcanic risk, what we can do about it and why we should do it, about life as a cat modeller, about my amazing company Mitiga Solutions , about leaving academia for the insurance sector, about holiday recommendations for volcano-philes, and anything else that may come to my mind. Stay tuned!