Natural disasters pose important problems for societies and governments. Governments are charged with making policies to protect public safety. Large disasters, then, can reveal problems in government policies designed to protect the public from the effects of such disasters. Large disasters can serve as focusing events, a term used to describe large, sudden, rare, and harmful events that gain a lot of attention from the public and from policy makers. Such disasters highlight problems and, as the public policy literature suggests, open windows of opportunity for policy change. However, as a review of United States disaster policy from 1950 through 2015 shows, change in disaster policy is often, but not always, driven by major disasters that act as focusing events. But the accumulation of experience from such disasters can lead to learning, which can be useful if later, even more damaging and attention-grabbing events arise.
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Policy Process Theory and Natural Hazards
Thomas A. Birkland
Article
Politics and Policies for Managing Natural Hazards
Timothy D. Mulligan, Kristin Taylor, and Rob A. DeLeo
Policies to manage natural hazards are made in a political context that has three important characteristics: local preferences and national priorities, short-sighted political decision-making, and policy choices informed by experience instead of future expectations. National governments can set broad policy priorities for natural hazard management, but it is often local governments, with conflicting policy priorities and distinctive hazard profiles, that have the authority to implement. Moreover, legislators who are tasked with passing laws to put policies into force are rewarded with reelection by voters who are only concerned with issues that have an immediate impact on their day-to-day lives (e.g., the economy) as opposed to hazards that may or may not occur until some undetermined point in the future. Finally, legislators themselves face challenges making policies to mitigate and manage hazards because they fail to see the longer-term risks and instead make decisions based on past experiences. This article broadly lays out the challenges of the policy environment for natural hazards, including intergovernmental concerns, policy myopia, and shifting policy priorities. It also describes the politics shaping the management of natural hazards, namely, electoral politics, the social dynamics of blame assignment, and the various political benefits associated with disaster relief spending.
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Post-Disaster Housing Recovery
Anuradha Mukherji
Rapid urbanization and growing populations have put tremendous pressures on limited global housing stocks. As the frequency of disasters has increased with devastating impacts on this limited stock of housing, the discourse on postdisaster housing recovery has evolved in several ways. Prior to the 1970s, the field was largely understudied, and there was a narrow understanding of how households and communities rebuilt their homes after a catastrophic event and on the effectiveness of housing recovery policy and programs designed to assist them. Early debates on postdisaster housing recovery centered on cultural and technological appropriateness of housing recovery programs. The focus on materials, technology, and climate missed larger socioeconomic and political complexities of housing recovery. Since then, the field has come a long way: current theoretical and policy debates focus on the effect of governance structures, funding practices, the consequences of public and private interventions, and socioeconomic and institutional arrangements that effect housing recovery outcomes.
There are a number of critical issues that shape long-term postdisaster housing recovery processes and outcomes, especially in urban contexts. Some of them include the role of the government in postdisaster housing recovery, governance practices that drive recovery processes and outcomes, the challenges of paying for postdisaster housing repair and reconstruction, the disconnect between planning for rebuilding and planning for housing recovery, and the mismatch between existing policy programs and housing needs after a catastrophic event—particularly for affordable housing recovery. Moreover, as housing losses after disasters continue to increase, and as the funding available to rebuild housing stocks shrinks, it has become increasingly important to craft postdisaster housing recovery policy and programs that apply the limited resources in the most efficient and impactful ways. Creating housing recovery programs by employing a needs-based approach instead of one based solely on loss could more effectively focus limited resources on those that might need it the most. Such an approach would be broad based and proportional, as it would address the housing recovery of a wide range of groups based upon their needs, including low-income renters, long-term leaseholders, residents of informal settlements and manufactured homes, as well as those with preexisting resources such as owner-occupant housing.
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Psychological Strategies and Challenges in Disaster Recovery
Priscilla Dass-Brailsford
This is an advance summary of a forthcoming article in the Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Natural Hazard Science. Please check back later for the full article.
Natural disasters have increased dramatically in the twenty-first century. An estimated 217 million people are affected by natural disasters each year. Recent disasters, both nationally and globally, provide insight into how the degree of destruction and number of fatalities can negatively affect survivors. Cultural, political, and geographic factors may increase risk of trauma and negative mental health outcomes. Understanding these risks is critical to helping survivors recover in the aftermath of disasters. Different disasters pose different risks, and some communities are chronically affected. How to support these communities psychologically in the face of ongoing threats of destruction is an important question.
Recent years have also seen major advances in technology that provide new and innovative ways to manage disasters. Technological strategies can be harnessed to better serve the interests of disaster-affected communities. For example, warning times for disasters have increased because of better instrumentation and the ability to send messages sooner to communities that may be in the path of a disaster. These increased warning times may allow for psychological preparation before a disaster that can support positive mental health outcomes in recovery. Demands for evidence-based mental health interventions require an understanding of best practices in disaster response, challenges to past relief efforts, and the strategies and factors that can enhance effective future efforts.
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Public Administrators in Natural Hazards Governance
Scott E. Robinson and Warren S. Eller
Natural hazards governance calls upon a diverse array of actors. The focus of most research—and most media coverage—has long been on governmental actors. Indeed, natural hazards governance relies on a complex arrangement of actors connected from the local, state, and national levels. Local organizations are the initial point of contact and face emerging threats. If the event exceeds the capacity of local organizations to respond, the governance system escalates the problem by expanding the participants to include state-level and, eventually, national-level actors. Natural hazards governance seeks to smooth and rationalize this process of escalation and expansion. Recent research has expanded this view to include nongovernmental actors like charitable organizations, religious institutions, and even private business. While charitable organizations have long been part of natural hazards governance, a broader range of charities, religious institutions, and private-sector companies has recently become more important to practice and scholarship. In many ways, the governance of these nongovernmental organizations resembles the structure of the governmental structure with its emphasis on escalation, expansion, and functional differentiation. Given the inclusion of so diverse a group of cooperating organizations, natural hazards governance faces notable challenges of communication, authority, and reliability.
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Public Participation in Planning for Community Management of Natural Hazards
Andrea Sarzynski and Paolo Cavaliere
Public participation in environmental management, and more specifically in hazard mitigation planning, has received much attention from scholars and practitioners. A shift in perspective now sees the public as a fundamental player in decision-making rather than simply as the final recipient of a policy decision. Including the public in hazard mitigation planning brings widespread benefits. First, communities gain awareness of the risks they live with, and thus, this is an opportunity to empower communities and improve their resilience. Second, supported by a collaborative participation process, emergency managers and planners can achieve the ultimate goal of strong mitigation plans.
Although public participation is highly desired as an instrument to improve hazard mitigation planning, appropriate participation techniques are context dependent and some trade-offs exist in the process design (such as between representativeness and consensus building). Designing participation processes requires careful planning and an all-around consideration of the representativeness of stakeholders, timing, objectives, knowledge, and ultimately desired goals to achieve. Assessing participation also requires more consistent methods to facilitate policy learning from diverse experiences. New decision-support tools may be necessary to gain widespread participation from laypersons lacking technical knowledge of hazards and risks.
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Public–Private Partnerships and Natural Hazards Governance
Dane S. Egli
The level of interest in public–private partnerships (P3s) is growing—along with supporting literature—and applications are expanding to include new areas where industry supplements public investments in return for measurable rewards. In what follows are timely observations to support P3 operating principles for natural hazards governance—working as an integrated team, sharing innovations, solving technical and operational problems, and engaging in voluntary associations to creatively solve problems.
P3s involve voluntary collaboration to achieve common goals and financial benefit. In a globalized economy with highly interconnected systems, this spirit of innovation, sense of personal responsibility, and vision for collective partnerships can be seen throughout the world in the application of P3s. The impact and efficacy of P3s is not just realized in the pursuit of economic, security, safety, social, and environmental goals, but also in establishing integrated governance policies to contend with the persistent vulnerabilities of natural hazards.
The emerging world of P3s and natural hazards governance can be illustrated by three real-world examples: (1) a catastrophic regional natural disaster; (2) an urban research-study focused on the measurement of critical infrastructure resilience; and (3) a summary of transportation systems in the unique environment of maritime ports. From these case studies, and a diverse selection of references, it highlights key findings that will benefit future research, critical analysis, and policy application, including academic value, integrated participation, evidence-based metrics, smart resilience, and future innovation.
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Public Sector Agencies and Their Formal Legal and Administrative Responsibilities
Ashley D. Ross
Public sector agencies at all levels of government work to mitigate risk, prepare for and respond to emergencies and disasters, and recover from catastrophic events. This action is guided by a national emergency management system that has evolved over time and was most recently reformed post–Hurricane Katrina. There is an extensive set of federal guidelines by the Department of Homeland Security and the Federal Emergency Management Agency that serve to structure the national system of hazard management. These include: the National Preparedness Goal; the National Preparedness System; National Planning Frameworks and accompanying Federal Interagency Operational Plans (FIOPs); the National Preparedness Report; and the Campaign to Build and Sustain Preparedness. Despite the considerable institutional and administrative guidance, there remain critical gaps in public-agency natural hazard management. These include lack of quality planning on the subnational level, insufficient local fiscal and human capital, and inconsistent regulation of the recovery process. While stricter implementation of federal mandates may partly address some of these issues, others will require greater political will in order to enact zoning regulations, create a shift in the acceptance of risk, and ensure that solutions are afforded by partnerships between civil, economic, and public entities.
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Public Sector Agency Choice of Policy Instruments Across Governance Systems
Beverly Cigler
A core responsibility of government is to protect people and property from disasters caused by natural hazards. The wide mix of policy instruments available and their impacts across governance systems to prevent and mitigate such disasters, to prepare and respond when they occur, and to provide for recovery offer a wealth of lessons for understanding policy instrument choice and impacts in a policy arena crucial to ensuring public safety. The array of options spans the entire policy process from problem definition and agenda-setting to policymaking, decision-making, and implementation, as well as evaluation. Regulatory instruments are especially important but individual voluntary behaviors are crucial. Instrument selection for dealing with natural hazards is a relatively understudied but emerging topic in the policy literature overall, which can inform the gamut of classical issues in the study of public policy.
Comparative public policy research, an historical perspective, and careful attention to an array of research approaches are especially useful for examining instrument selection for natural hazards policies. This allows for acknowledging the gamut of diverse actors and agencies that span the public, private, and nonprofit sectors, as well as civil society. Policy choices are both domestic and internationalized. Importantly, policy instrument choices need to be examined across multiple levels of governance, both horizontal and vertical, and must not focus solely on the mix of policy instruments but also on actors and institutional structures, settings, and cultures. Research in political science, economics, public policy, and public administration is especially informative regarding public sector agency choice of policy instruments.
Article
Queering “Gender and Disaster” for Inclusive Disaster Risk Reduction
Louise Baumann, Aditi Sharan, and JC Gaillard
In disaster studies, the “gender question” has so far been mainly addressed through the conceptual Western binary sex/gender alignment. This results in excluding from the conversation a large part of the population: those who live and present themselves in gender roles that do not match the one assigned to them at birth, do not experience gender in a way that is exactly male or female, or sometimes even reject the simple existence of what we call “gender.” Trans, nonbinary, queer, and other nonconforming gender identities’ experience of disasters remains therefore largely excluded from broader gender and disaster literature, policy, and practice. Yet, by endorsing the Western binary sex/gender alignment, gender and disaster scholars and practitioners not only risk reproducing the same oppressive discourses they intend to dismantle but also might miss the opportunity to advance their objective of implementing effective and inclusive disaster risk reduction policies and practices.
Article
Readiness for Natural Hazards
Douglas Paton
Humankind has always lived with natural hazards and their consequences. While the frequency and intensity of geological processes may have remained relatively stable, population growth and infrastructure development in areas susceptible to experiencing natural hazards has increased societal risk and the losses experienced from hazard activity. Furthermore, increases in weather-related (e.g., hurricanes, wildfires) hazards emanating from climate change will increase risk in some countries and result in others having to deal with natural hazard risk for the first time.
Faced with growing and enduring risk, disaster risk reduction (DRR) strategies will play increasingly important roles in facilitating societal sustainability. This article discusses how readiness or preparedness makes an important contribution to comprehensive DRR. Readiness is defined here in terms of those factors that facilitate people’s individual and collective capability to anticipate, cope with, adapt to, and recover from hazard consequences. This article first discusses the need to conceptualize readiness as comprising several functional categories (structural, survival/direct action, psychological, community/capacity building, livelihood and community-agency readiness).
Next, the article discusses how the nature and extent of people’s readiness is a function of the interaction between the information available and the personal, family, community and societal factors used to interpret information and support readiness decision-making. The health belief model (HBM), protection motivation theory (PMT), person-relative-to-event (PrE) theory, theory of planned behavior (TPB), critical awareness (CA), protective action decision model (PADM), and community engagement theory (CET) are used to introduce variables that inform people’s readiness decision-making. A need to consider readiness as a developmental process is discussed and identifies how the variables introduced in the above theories play different roles at different stages in the development of comprehensive readiness.
Because many societies must learn to coexist with several sources of hazard, an “all-hazards” approach is required to facilitate the capacity of societies and their members to be resilient in the face of the various hazard consequences they may have to contend with. This article discusses research into readiness for the consequences that arise from earthquake, volcanic, flood, hurricane, and tornado hazards. Furthermore, because hazards transcend national and cultural divides, a comprehensive conceptualization of readiness must accommodate a cross-cultural perspective. Issues in the cross-cultural testing of theory is discussed, as is the need for further work into the relationship between readiness and culture-specific beliefs and processes.
Article
Real-Time Flash Flood Forecasting
Jonathan J. Gourley and Robert A. Clark III
Flash floods are one of the world’s deadliest and costliest weather-related natural hazards. In the United States alone, they account for an average of approximately 80 fatalities per year. Damages to crops and infrastructure are particularly costly. In 2015 alone, flash floods accounted for over $2 billion of losses; this was nearly half the total cost of damage caused by all weather hazards. Flash floods can be either pluvial or fluvial, but their occurrence is primarily driven by intense rainfall. Predicting the specific locations and times of flash floods requires a multidisciplinary approach because the severity of the impact depends on meteorological factors, surface hydrologic preconditions and controls, spatial patterns of sensitive infrastructure, and the dynamics describing how society is using or occupying the infrastructure.
Real-time flash flood forecasting systems rely on the observations and/or forecasts of rainfall, preexisting soil moisture and river-stage states, and geomorphological characteristics of the land surface and subsurface. The design of the forecast systems varies across the world in terms of their forcing, methodology, forecast horizon, and temporal and spatial scales. Their diversity can be attributed at least partially to the availability of observing systems and numerical weather prediction models that provide information at relevant scales regarding the location, timing, and severity of impending flash floods. In the United States, the National Weather Service (NWS) has relied upon the flash flood guidance (FFG) approach for decades. This is an inverse method in which a hydrologic model is run under differing rainfall scenarios until flooding conditions are reached. Forecasters then monitor observations and forecasts of rainfall and issue warnings to the public and local emergency management communities when the rainfall amounts approach or exceed FFG thresholds. This technique has been expanded to other countries throughout the world. Another approach, used in Europe, relies on model forecasts of heavy rainfall, where anomalous conditions are identified through comparison of the forecast cumulative rainfall (in space and time) with a 20-year archive of prior forecasts. Finally, explicit forecasts of flash flooding are generated in real time across the United States based on estimates of rainfall from a national network of weather radar systems.
Article
Reconceptualizing the Social, Environmental, and Political Hazards Associated With Conflict-Induced Displacement in the Republic of Georgia
Suzanne Harris-Brandts and David Sichinava
Following the Soviet Union’s disintegration in the early 1990s, Georgia entered several ethnic conflicts with its autonomous regions, Abkhazia and South Ossetia, which have sought unilateral secession. In total, over 300,000 people—primarily ethnic Georgians—have been forced to flee, finding refuge in other areas of Georgia, and becoming internally displaced persons (IDPs). To date, displacement in the country has largely been framed as a conflict-induced phenomenon tied to several acute periods of violence. Yet the hazards IDPs face do not end following their initial displacement. Up to 45% of IDPs have found refuge in vacant, non-purpose-built buildings—so-called collective centers (also referred to as organized resettlement facilities for displaced persons, “დევნილთა ორგანიზებულად ჩასახლების ობიექტები” in Georgian)—including former factories, kindergartens, hospitals, and hotel-sanatoria. There, they are exposed to mold, contaminated soil, sewage, and other environmental hazards. Government mobilization to improve collective centers or relocate IDPs elsewhere has been slow, in part due to weak state institutions and a lack of resources, with the state heavily reliant on international aid. Historically, the state also had a vested interest in maintaining the status quo of precarious IDP housing given that the right of return is interconnected with Georgia’s sovereign territorial claims. The hazardous environmental conditions of IDP collective centers have, therefore, been politically weaponized by the government, showcased to domestic and international audiences alike as evidence of the urgency in unifying Georgia’s territory.
Since the late 2000s—decades after initial displacement—the government has finally shifted its approach and IDPs are incrementally being granted tenure or being resettled in purpose-built housing. Yet this, too, has prompted a reconceptualization of the social, environmental, and political hazards associated with displacement. In the early 21st century, the environmentally hazardous living conditions of Georgia’s collective centers are being used to justify IDP forced evictions in areas prioritized for urban redevelopment. The result is secondary displacement and an erasure of IDPs’ local histories. In these ways, environmental hazards have become deeply entwined with the social and political aspects of internal displacement in Georgia. The loss of collective centers in prime real estate areas links to a different aspect of post-hazard reconstruction yet one also deserving of attention. IDP identity is embedded within these spaces and should not be simply erased by future development. In such situations, there are socioeconomic and political complexities beyond the acute and pragmatic needs of securing humanitarian shelter away from violence. Thus, the line between displacement-induced hazards and political and environmental ones is blurred, making distinct categorizations less useful. Understanding these interconnections relative to issues of governance, resettlement, housing provision, and urban renewal is crucial to effectively support Georgia’s IDPs.
Article
Relocation due to Climate Change
Vicki M. Bier and Susan B. King
Coastal flooding due to sea-level rise associated with climate change is likely to lead to long-term relocation (as opposed to short-term evacuation) of sizable populations from at-risk areas. Flooding has major adverse effects on the people affected by it, making it advantageous for people to relocate proactively (before experiencing major flooding) rather than only in the aftermath of flooding. However, relocation itself can also be associated with significant hardship, both financial and otherwise, making planning and assistance important in facilitating relocation.
Several social and cultural factors, including social capital and social cohesion, can affect the extent to which vulnerable populations are resilient to the risk of disasters such as flooding. A number of actions and planning efforts can enhance resilience and minimize adverse impacts of both flooding and relocation. These include planning efforts to reduce the need for relocation in at-risk areas, economic incentives to facilitate and encourage voluntary relocation, assistance to support people in preparing for relocation, and planning to accommodate relocatees in possible receiving communities. In particular, receiving communities will need to deal with considerations of housing availability. In all of these processes, special attention is needed to effectively address issues of equity (e.g., difficulties experienced by low-income or less educated individuals in accessing available aid) as well as differing levels of community administrative capacity. Finally, disaster planning has historically focused primarily on the needs of homeowners; further attention to the needs of renters is therefore needed. Many of these tasks require leadership and coordination at the national and state levels (e.g., to review and possibly redesign assistance and financial-aid programs for disaster preparedness and recovery to improve equity).
Article
Remote Sensing of Floods
Guy J.-P. Schumann
For about 40 years, with a proliferation over the last two decades, remote sensing data, primarily in the form of satellite and airborne imagery and altimetry, have been used to study floods, floodplain inundation, and river hydrodynamics. The sensors and data processing techniques that exist to derive information about floods are numerous. Instruments that record flood events may operate in the visible, thermal, and microwave range of the electromagnetic spectrum. Due to the limitations posed by adverse weather conditions during flood events, radar (microwave range) sensors are invaluable for monitoring floods; however, if a visible image of flooding can be acquired, retrieving useful information from this is often more straightforward. During recent years, scientific contributions in the field of remote sensing of floods have increased considerably, and science has presented innovative research and methods for retrieving information content from multi-scale coverages of disastrous flood events all over the world. Progress has been transformative, and the information obtained from remote sensing of floods is becoming mature enough to not only be integrated with computer simulations of flooding to allow better prediction, but also to assist flood response agencies in their operations.
Furthermore, this advancement has led to a number of recent and upcoming satellite missions that are already transforming current procedures and operations in flood modeling and monitoring, as well as our understanding of river and floodplain hydrodynamics globally. Global initiatives that utilize remote sensing data to strengthen support in managing and responding to flood disasters (e.g., The International Charter, The Dartmouth Flood Observatory, CEOS, NASA’s Servir and the European Space Agency’s Tiger-Net initiatives), primarily in developing nations, are becoming established and also recognized by many nations that are in need of assistance because traditional ground-based monitoring systems are sparse and in decline. The value remote sensing can offer is growing rapidly, and the challenge now lies in ensuring sustainable and interoperable use as well as optimized distribution of remote sensing products and services for science as well as operational assistance.
Article
Remote Sensing and Physical Modeling of Fires, Floods, and Landslides
Mahesh Prakash, James Hilton, Claire Miller, Vincent Lemiale, Raymond Cohen, and Yunze Wang
Remotely sensed data for the observation and analysis of natural hazards is becoming increasingly commonplace and accessible. Furthermore, the accuracy and coverage of such data is rapidly improving. In parallel with this growth are ongoing developments in computational methods to store, process, and analyze these data for a variety of geospatial needs. One such use of this geospatial data is for input and calibration for the modeling of natural hazards, such as the spread of wildfires, flooding, tidal inundation, and landslides. Computational models for natural hazards show increasing real-world applicability, and it is only recently that the full potential of using remotely sensed data in these models is being understood and investigated. Some examples of geospatial data required for natural hazard modeling include:
• elevation models derived from RADAR and Light Detection and Ranging (LIDAR) techniques for flooding, landslide, and wildfire spread models
• accurate vertical datum calculations from geodetic measurements for flooding and tidal inundation models
• multispectral imaging techniques to provide land cover information for fuel types in wildfire models or roughness maps for flood inundation studies
Accurate modeling of such natural hazards allows a qualitative and quantitative estimate of risks associated with such events. With increasing spatial and temporal resolution, there is also an opportunity to investigate further value-added usage of remotely sensed data in the disaster modeling context. Improving spatial data resolution allows greater fidelity in models allowing, for example, the impact of fires or flooding on individual households to be determined. Improving temporal data allows short and long-term trends to be incorporated into models, such as the changing conditions through a fire season or the changing depth and meander of a water channel.
Article
Researching Gender in Disasters
Chaya Ocampo Go
Natural hazards such as floods, droughts, and earthquakes do not discriminate, but individuals of varying gender identities are impacted by, experience, understand, and respond differently to disasters. Research on gender in disaster contexts first began in the 1990s and grew to examine topics including gendered vulnerabilities, capacities, women’s rights, and representation. This was bolstered by the rise of global women’s movements and the institutional recognition by international relief agencies and the United Nations of women’s needs and participation in disasters. In addition to the growth of various feminist movements, feminist scholarship in academia challenged the predominance of positivist epistemologies, quantitative methodologies, and male bias in the gathering, analysis, and presentation of data in disaster research. Feminist scholarship aided in the shift in disaster studies from a hazards paradigm to a vulnerability paradigm wherein the study of disasters is no longer confined to the measurement and management of physical forces but also includes the uncovering of the political processes that produce disasters. Feminist scholars began to promote the critical use of self-reflexive, in-depth qualitative methodologies such as ethnography, participatory action research, and activist collaborations with grassroots civic organizations. Such research studies examine power relations and inequalities, and they strive toward realizing emancipatory goals for social justice in the fields of disaster research and practice.
Critical disaster research continues to advance in the early 21st century through the persistent questioning of the “natural”-ness of disasters. Despite the great strides in gender studies in disasters, the word “gender” remains predominantly equated with the category of heterosexual women and therefore perpetuates the male–female and nature–culture divides inherent in the Western epistemologies that underlie disaster research. Therefore, scholars who employ postcolonial, antiracist, and decolonial feminist frameworks trouble the coloniality of disasters, theorize, and study the violence of the colonial present on gendered and racialized spaces and bodies. Creative arts-based and participatory methods, including oral histories, photovoice, interviews, theater, body mapping, among others, are used to make visible those who are misrepresented and absent in disaster discourse. Gender and sexual minorities have also been historically neglected in disaster research, and the advancement of queer scholarship has begun to make more visible the lives of non-heterosexual identities in disasters. The conduct of fieldwork, interviews, ethnography, autoethnography, and collaborative and even quantitative methods can be queered or made non-normative through the examination of intimacies, subjectivities, emotions, performativity, relationships, and ethics in gender research. Last, the rise of climate change adaptation studies, policies, and practices also presents similar gaps in gender research. Feminist research methods such as the use of participatory geographic information system mapping challenge technological assessments of climate change adaptation interventions. They aid instead in sustaining a political analysis of power, examining people’s susceptibility to harm, together with processes that maintain this exposure to danger for bodies of different gender identities.
Article
Resilience and Cascading Disasters
Gianluca Pescaroli, Benjamin D. Trump, Igor Linkov, and David E. Alexander
In the 1st decades of the 21st century, society became highly interconnected and increasingly dependent on the delivery of essential services assured by critical infrastructure and tightly coupled systems. Its vulnerability to disruptions has become more concerning. Events like the 2010 Eyjafjallajökull eruption disrupting air transportation and the 2011 earthquake, tsunami, and nuclear meltdown in Japan underscore the importance of adopting the concept of cascading disasters for advancing the field of emergency planning and management. The potential of this approach, based on understanding the possible escalation of secondary crises, became more evident when considering the impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic and the compounded weather extremes from climate change.
The premise for understanding the new operational reality of the 21st century is accepting that there are conditions of higher uncertainty, whereby disruptions are becoming the new “business as usual” and are bound to happen across highly reliable systems. The recombination of crisis extremes, failures, and vulnerabilities takes new forms that are harder to predict and model, reducing the effectiveness of existing methods of risk assessment and disaster risk reduction approaches.
There is an urgent need to develop flexible procedures that could shift toward a comprehensive understanding of system-wide resilience management. An option worth considering is a focus on understanding the common points of failure in the operational context, considering both society and organizations. Addressing resources on the weaknesses between known and unknown events will support leveraging existing capacity, aligning short-term responses with long-term planning, and fostering collaboration between social and physical sciences, as well as academics and practitioners. The adoption of new tools, such as stress testing, could facilitate a “threat-agnostic approach” in emergency and continuity management, enhancing response flexibility.
Article
Resilient Cities
Abhilash Panda and Dilanthi Amaratunga
In 1990, 43% (2.3 billion) of the world’s population lived in urban areas, and by 2014 this percentage was at 54%. The urban population exceeded the rural population for the first time in 2008, and by 2050 it is predicted that urbanization will rise to 70% (see Albrito, “Making cities resilient: Increasing resilience to disasters at the local level,” Journal of Business Continuity & Emergency Planning, 2012). However, this increase in urban population has not been evenly spread throughout the world. As the urban population increases, the land area occupied by cities has increased at an even higher rate. It has been projected that by 2030, the urban population of developing countries will double, while the area covered by cities will triple (see United Nations, Department of Economic and Social Affairs, “World Urbanization Prospects: The 2014 Revision”). This emphasizes the need for resilience in the urban environment to anticipate and respond to disasters. Realizing this need, many local and international organizations have developed tools and frameworks to assist governments to plan and implement disaster risk reduction strategies efficiently. Sendai Framework’s Priorities for Action, Making Cities Resilient: My City is Getting Ready, and UNISDR’s Disaster Resilience Scorecard for Cities are major documents that provide essential guidelines for urban resilience. Given that, the disaster governance also needs to be efficient with ground-level participation for the implementation of these frameworks. This can be reinforced by adequate financing and resources depending on the exposure and risk of disasters. In essence, the resilience of a city is the resistance, coping capacity, recovery, adaptive capacity, and responsibility of everyone.
Article
Resilient Hospital Structures, Systems, and Services
Nebil Achour
Interest in health care resilience began in the mid-1940s, but it took approximately two decades for researchers to realize its importance. By the early 2000s, the body of knowledge reached a level of maturity, with details of international case studies about the performance of health facilities and systems in responding to multiple hazards and also guidance and regulations to secure the minimum level of resilience of health systems. However, the failure of health systems to respond effectively to COVID-19 indicates that preparedness was not adequate and that there is a gap between this body of knowledge and practice. This gap is driven by many factors but mostly the Lost in Translation (LiT) Effect. The LiT Effect occurs when the application of guidelines is done in a mechanical, “paper filing” manner, without understanding their goal and the knowledge behind them. There are many contributors to the LiT Effect, including appropriate knowledge of disaster resilience, an individual’s workload and motivation and capability to acquire new knowledge, let alone the difference between agendas and organizational priorities. Some of these have been investigated and concluded that more work is needed to translate strategic evidence at operational levels. This will enhance the further learning of professionals and enable them to develop adequate plans.
The way disaster resilience is approached is one of the key issues of health care vulnerability. Health systems struggle with the large number of day-to-day challenges. Disaster resilience is low on decision-makers’ lists of priorities, specifically when risks are moderate or low, because it is viewed as a burden instead of an obligation, a moral and a legal requirement. The analogy of the human body, specifically the immune system, can help us understand how health care facilities’ internal systems operate. Immunity is integrated throughout the body; it detects and manages most external hazards such as bacteria and viruses without affecting daily activities. The immunity of the human body is comparable to the resilience of health care facilities and health systems and perhaps should operate in a similar way. Resilience needs to be embedded in the daily operations of health systems and facilities. The Jigsaw Concept is a simplified approach to enhance understanding of the complexity of health care facilities and systems without overlooking details. It applies structured thinking to reduce the LiT Effect by identifying the components of health care facilities and systems, their interconnectivity and interdependency, and predicting and mitigating the impact of the failure of each of these on the overall functionality in a continuous and integrated way. This functionality depends on six internal interconnected components, namely building integrity, lifeline systems, equipment, supplies, workforce, and management and governance to regulate the way all these operate. Externally, it depends on interdependent components such as suppliers and infrastructure (e.g., transportation, power, water, internet, and gas networks). Failure of one of these could cause direct or indirect failure of the continuity of health care service. Each of these components plays a unique role in the system, similar to pieces of a jigsaw puzzle that must be assembled in a specific way to provide a clear picture and clarity is affected when one piece is missing. Advanced and smart technologies might play a role in dealing with this compounded complexity; however, many questions must be answered before this technology is applied, including questions regarding ethics and ownership of used and generated data.
