The need for open, transdisciplinary, and ethical science in seismology

The devastating 2023 M7.8 Türkiye–Syria earthquake sequence once again highlighted the gap between (seismological) knowledge and action: Although the impacted region is known to be at high seismic risk (i.e., highly seismically active and densely populated), the political and societal conditions have complicated and delayed protective measures. To reduce the seismic risk and prepare local communities, experts from different disciplines must collaborate effectively in redesigning the built environment and engaging the community in risk education and management (Comfort et al., 2023). In recent years, three subjects have become increasingly relevant to build that needed bridge between scientific knowledge and societal action: open science, transdisciplinarity, and ethics (see Figure 1). They have influenced scientific discussions on how to transition from purely scientific research to practical and societally relevant applications that increase societies’ resilience to disasters (e.g., Marti et al., 2022) – just as envisioned by the European Union’s Horizon 2020 project ‘Real-time earthquake rIsk reduction for a reSilient Europe’ (RISE) concerning earthquake risk. We and other early career scientists of RISE identified these three subjects in several virtual discussions while reflecting on our needs to better understand how we can make our research efforts more societally meaningful and effective. Eventually, together with several senior scientists of RISE, we discussed and evaluated these subjects during a three-day workshop under the theme “Bringing research to practical applications that increase society’s earthquake resilience” (Supplement 1). This theme resembled RISE’s overall goal to advance the scientific and societal knowledge on dynamic seismic risk, the overarching topic we additionally wanted to explore. First, keynotes from experts gave us a background on the three subjects, and lightning talks by all participants revealed the range of our expertise. Second, we drew a rich picture for the overarching topic and each subject following the Soft Systems Methodology (Pohl, 2020): separate groups sketch and express their ideas as mental models, receive feedback from the other groups, and revise it accordingly (see Supplement S2a-d for the evolution of the rich pictures). This approach allowed us to integrate all our expertise on the topic and subjects. We provide the conceptual background of the three main subjects, stress their relevance in current research, and illustrate their link to dynamic seismic risk (Figure 1). We believe that these reflections can be transferred to any other research field since the subjects affect various disciplines.