From November 15 to 16, 2018, the Institute of Science, Technology and Society and the Norwegian Research Foundation Fafo jointly organized a symposium on the 40th anniversary of reform and opening up and the 10th anniversary of the Wenchuan earthquake. At the meeting, the main findings of the four household sampling surveys organized by CASTED since the Wenchuan earthquake were released. Yang Qiquan, former Vice President of CASTED, Anne Kari Johansen, Scientific and Educational Counsellor of the Norwegian Embassy in China, and Zhang Sujuan, Head of the Disaster Management Branch of the United Nations Development Programme, attended the opening ceremony and delivered speeches. Experts and scholars from the US, the UK, Belgium, Japan, Nepal and China’s Taiwan, as well as Renmin University, Beijing Normal University, Shandong University, Southeast University, Southwest Jiaotong University, China Earthquake Administration and other Chinese universities and scientific research institutions were invited to make keynote speeches. They shared the achievements of their long-standing research in the field of disasters and had a discussion on post-disaster economic and social rehabilitation and reconstruction, capacity building for disaster prevention and preparedness, and theoretical methods for disaster monitoring and assessment.