The aging population, also referred to as elderly or seniors, represents a demographic of growing significance for disaster management. The population pyramid, an important indicator of population growth, stability, and decline, has shifted from the typical pyramid shape into more of a dome shape when viewing trends globally. While these demographic shifts in age structure are unique to individual countries, adjustments in disaster management are needed to reduce the risk of aging populations increasingly affected by hazards.
Risk is especially evident when considering where aging populations live, as proximity to environmental hazards such as flooding, tropical storm surge, fires, and extreme weather resulting in heat and cold increase their risk. Aging populations may live alone or together in retirement communities and senior living facilities where the respective isolation or high density of older adults present specific risks.
There is a concern in areas with high economic productivity, also considered post-industrial areas, where the population consists more of those who are aging and less of those who are younger to support the labor needs of the market and more specifically to support and engage aging populations. This disparity becomes even more prominent in specific sectors such as healthcare, including senior living assistance. In developing economies, the young are increasingly leaving traditionally intergenerational households to seek greater economic opportunities in cities, leaving many seniors on their own. Thus, risk reduction strategies must be conscious of the needs and contributions of seniors as well as the capacity of the workforce to implement them.
The integration of aging populations within disaster management through accommodation and consultation varies across the globe. Provision of services for and personal agency among senior populations can mitigate vulnerabilities associated with age, as well as compounding factors such as medical fragility, societal interaction, and income. Experience, mobility, and socioeconomic capabilities affect decision making and outcomes of aging populations in hazardous settings. Therefore, the means of involvement in disaster planning should be adapted to accommodate the sociocultural, economic, and environmental realities of aging populations.
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Jennifer Whytlaw and Nicole S. Hutton
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Anthony Oliver-Smith
Large-scale displacement takes place in the context of disaster because the threat or occurrence of hazard onset makes the region of residence of a population uninhabitable, either temporarily or permanently. Contributing to that outcome, the wide array of disaster events is invariably complicated by human institutions and practices that can contribute to large-scale population displacements. Growing trends of socially driven exposure and vulnerability around the world as well as the global intensification and frequency of climate-related hazards have increased both the incidence and the likelihood of large-scale population dislocations in the near future. However, legally binding international and national accords and conventions have not yet been put in place to deal with the serious impacts, and material, health-related, and sociocultural losses and human rights violations that are experienced by the millions of people being swept up in the events and processes of disasters and mass population displacements. Effective policy development is challenged by the increasing complexity of disaster risk and occurrence as well as issues of causation, adequate information, lack of capacity, and legal responsibility. States, international organizations, state and international development and aid agencies must frame, define, and categorize appropriately disaster forced displacement and resettlement to influence effective institutional responses in emergency humanitarian assistance, transitional shelter and care, and durable solutions in managing migration and resettlement if return is not possible. The forms that disaster-associated forced displacements are projected to take and corresponding national responses are explored in the Indian Ocean tsunami of 2004 in Sri Lanka, a massive disaster in a nation riven by civil conflict; Hurricane Katrina of 2005 in the United States, where the scale and nature of displacement bore little relation to hazard intensity; and the 2011 Great East Japan Earthquake, Tsunami, and nuclear exposure incident exemplifying the emerging trend of complex, concatenating, multihazard disasters that bring about large-scale population displacements.
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Populations that are rendered socially invisible by their relegation to realms that are excluded—either physically or experientially—from the rest of society tend to similarly be left out of community disaster planning, often with dire consequences. Older adults, persons with disabilities, linguistic minorities, and other socially marginalized groups face amplified risks that translate into disproportionately negative outcomes when disasters strike. Moreover, these disparities are often reproduced in the aftermath of disasters, further reinforcing preexisting inequities. Even well-intentioned approaches to disaster service delivery have historically homogenized and segregated distinct populations under the generic moniker of “special needs,” thereby undermining their own effectiveness at serving those in need.
The access and functional needs perspective has been promoted within the emergency management field as a practical and inclusive means of accommodating a range of functional capacities in disaster planning. This framework calls for operationalizing needs into specific mechanisms of functional support that can be applied at each stage of the disaster lifecycle. Additionally, experts have emphasized the need to engage advocacy groups, organizations that routinely serve socially marginalized populations, and persons with activity limitations themselves to identify support needs. Incorporating these diverse entities into the planning process can help to build stronger, more resilient communities.
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Vicente Sandoval, Benjamin Wisner, and Martin Voss
The governance of natural hazards in Chile involves how different actors participate in all stages of managing natural hazards and their impacts. This includes monitoring and early warning systems and response to the most significant hazardous events in the country: earthquakes, tsunamis, volcanic eruptions, hydrological and meteorological events, and wildfires. Other general processes, such as disaster recovery, disaster risk reduction (DRR), and political economy and socioenvironmental processes of disaster risk creation are fundamental to understanding the complexity of natural hazard governance.
Chile has a long history of disasters linked to its geographical and climatological diversity as well as its history and development path. The country has made significant advances toward an effective disaster risk management (DRM) system, which is backed up by sophisticated monitoring systems for earthquakes, tsunamis, volcanic eruptions, hydro- and meteorological events, and wildfires. These technical advances are integrated with disaster response mechanisms that include trained personnel, regulatory frameworks, institutions, and other actors, all under the direction of the National Emergency Office. The Chilean mode of DRM and DRR is characterized by a centralized, top-down approach that limits the opportunities for community organizations to participate in discussions of DRR and decision-making. It also centralizes planning of post-disaster processes such as reconstruction. Likewise, the dominant politico-economic model of Chile is neoliberalism. This development path has reproduced the root causes of disaster vulnerability through socioeconomic inequalities as well as poorly regulated urbanization and the practices of extractive industries. This has created numerous socioenvironmental conflicts throughout the Chilean territory with sometimes hazardous effects on local communities, especially indigenous groups. The governance of hazards and risk reduction in Chile still has a long way to go to secure the country’s path to sustainable human development.
