Some of these limitations are frequently cited as limitations of GIS in general and they were recently reiterated in a session on the realities of GIS use in natural hazards mitigation at the 1996 Hazards Research and Applications Workshop in Colorado,USA. The lack of data for conducting GIS disaster studies and the difficulty in developing and understanding GIS models were cited limitations at this workshop. In the mitigation phase, it is expected that there will be increasing application of GIS toward the actual development of large-scale, systematic mitigation plans. The last ten years have witnessed a significant increase in risk assessment and mapping using GIS for a wide variety of hazard contexts, but ultimately this work must feed into actual mitigation planning and policy.