Disaster Readiness & Risk Reduction

Disaster Readiness & Risk Reduction

• Disaster is a serious disruption of community function, involving widespread loss of human, material, economic, or environmental resources that cannot be managed by communities.
• Vulnerability factors include monetary means, education, industrial zones, and global issues and human-induced problems. Areas with vulnerable and poorest populations are at higher risk for increasing damage. Measures such as the World Risk Index (WRI) analyze risk via 28 indicators and research, considering vulnerabilities and natural hazards.
• Vulnerability is a combination of physical, social, environmental, and economic factors.
• Exposure describes people or areas directly affected by disasters.
• Risk is the measure of losses, deaths, injuries, and damage from hazards. Coping capacity encompasses immediate effects to overcome a calamity, affected by various indexes like corruption perception, failed states index, number of physicians, hospital beds, and insurance coverage.
• Adaptive capacity is a population's long-term ability to survive a calamity and implement measures to prevent future events. Factors influencing this include literacy rates, education, gender equality, water availability, biodiversity, and government expenditures on health.
• Susceptibility is determined by country population access, sanitation, water supply, malnutrition/undernourishment levels, dependency ratio, poverty levels, GDP per capita, and Gini index.
• Agencies like UNU-EHS, UNISDR, and NOAH are involved in disaster risk reduction and assessment.
• Natural hazards include geological (earthquakes, volcanoes, tsunamis, landslides, floods, subsidence), and hydrometeorological (typhoons, tornadoes, droughts, thunderstorms) hazards.
• Human-induced disasters include anthropogenic hazards (hazardous materials, acid rain, global warming), biological hazards (viruses, bacteria, medical wastes), technological hazards (accidents, collapses, explosions), and socio-natural hazards (interactions of natural hazards with overexploitation).

Disaster Management Cycle

• Emergency management attempts to prevent, mitigate, prepare for, respond to, and recover from crises.
• Hazard assessment identifies and evaluates probabilities of impact after a disaster occurs.
• Disaster management plans should address all phases of emergencies, adopt a holistic approach, and identify available personnel and resources.
• Phases of EMC (Emergency Management Cycle):
  • Before (Mitigation & Preparation): Focuses on preventing future disasters and preparing for potential emergencies through community planning, local/regional emergency management, and enacting contingency plans by national/local governments in collaboration with communities.
  • After (Response & Recovery): Focuses on responding to the disaster and recovering from its impact through response operations and recovery planning.

Prevention-Mitigation & Preparedness Phase

• The prevention-mitigation phase is a formal, purposeful phase to prevent future disasters. Risk management is an integral part, identifying hazards for mitigation strategies.
• The preparedness phase develops a system for incident management, which includes the Incident Command System (ICS) with functional sections for planning, operations, finances, and logistics. ICS enables personnel from various agencies to coordinate and operate effectively and flexibly. This phase includes various personnel and agencies working together (common structure), clear communication systems, and a single leader/supervisor (depending on the situation).

Response Phase

• The response phase is where emergency management is fully operational. Effectiveness is dependent on the quality of prevention and preparedness processes. This phase addresses intensity and severity, relying on proper authority. Components include assessment of magnitude, activation of emergency management plans, resource deployment, and a transition to the recovery phase.

Recovery Phase

• The recovery phase is a continuous process that depends on the scope and type of the emergency. It focuses on communities healing, adapting, and continuing their lives with support from the authorities after a disaster. Communities might need new resources and support to restore their daily routines and rebuild their lives.