The sub-Saharan Africa (SSA) region, along with the rest of the African continent, is prone to a wide variety of natural hazards. Most of these hazards and the associated disasters are relatively silent and insidious, encroaching on life and livelihoods, increasing social, economic, and environmental vulnerability even to moderate events. With the majority of SSA’s disasters being of hydrometeorological origin, climate change through an increase in the frequency and magnitude of extreme weather events is likely to exacerbate the situation. Whereas a number of countries in SSA face significant governance challenges to effectively respond to disasters and manage risk reduction measures, considerable progress has been made since the early 2000s in terms of policies, strategies, and/or institutional mechanisms to advance disaster risk reduction and disaster risk management. As such, most countries in SSA have developed/reviewed policies, strategies, and plans and put in place institutions with dedicated staffs and resources for natural hazard management. However, the lack of financial backing, limited skills, lack of coordination among sectors, weak political leadership, inadequate communication, and shallow natural hazard risk assessment, hinders effective natural hazard management in SSA.
The focus here is on the governance of natural hazards in the sub-Saharan Africa region, and an outline of SSA’s natural hazard profile is presented. Climate change is increasing the frequency and magnitude of extreme weather events, thus influencing the occurrence of natural hazards in this region. Also emphasized are good practices in natural hazard governance, and SSA’s success stories are described. Finally, recommendations on governance arrangements for effective implementation of disaster risk reduction initiatives and measures are provided.
12
Article
Natural Hazards and Their Governance in Sub-Saharan Africa
Dewald van Niekerk and Livhuwani David Nemakonde
Article
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.
Article
Disaster Through a Feminist Lens: Epistemology, Methodology, and Methods
Kaira Zoe Alburo-Cañete
The foregrounding of gender and, more importantly, the ways in which power produces structures of inequality that shape gendered disaster vulnerabilities have given way to feminist theorizing on disasters. Since the 1990s, feminist works have raised critical questions regarding how conceptualizations of disasters, and the methodologies through which these are studied, have historically privileged androcentric perspectives. Viewing disaster through a feminist lens brings to light other dimensions of living with and responding to risk and disaster that are often elided in gender-blind approaches.
For feminist research, theory and practice are not disconnected. Feminist research is explanatory as well as prescriptive, putting emphasis on the need for transformative change especially in unequal gender relations. This perspective is solidified in the ways that feminist approaches foreground the close connections between epistemology, methodology, and methods and the political/ethical orientations they embody. Applied to disaster studies, feminist research highlights the importance of: (a) placing gender and lived experiences at the center of analysis; (b) recognizing how power operates in these contexts; (c) exploring alternative means to represent lived realities through different methods; (d) embodying reflexivity in the research process; and (e) pursuing social, political, and institutional change.
Applications of feminist methodologies in disaster studies have led to the development of innovative techniques in constructing alternative accounts of disaster experiences. These include but are not limited to feminist participatory action research, photo-based methods, and alternative mapping techniques. These applications have helped reveal often neglected issues such as gendered violence, women’s lack of representation in decision-making, family dynamics affecting access and control, gendering of state and institutional processes, to name a few, in varying contexts of disaster.
In sum, applying a feminist lens offers alternative perspectives on how disasters affect women and other social groups, emphasizing the importance of equitable, inclusive, and ethical research practices. By challenging existing knowledge frameworks and highlighting the relational and intersectional dimensions of disaster experiences, feminist methodologies contribute to a deeper understanding of lived experiences of disasters and the ways in which these are gendered while communicating perspectives of change.
Article
Natural Hazards Governance in South Africa
Dewald van Niekerk, G.J. Wentink, and L.B. Shoroma
Disaster and natural hazard governance has become a significant policy and legislative focus in South Africa since the early 1990s. Born out of necessity from a dysfunctional apartheid system, the new emphasis on disaster risk reduction in the democratic dispensation also ushered in a new era in the management of natural hazards and their associated risks and vulnerabilities. Widely cited as an international best practice in policy and law development, South Africa has led the way in natural hazard governance in sub-Sahara Africa as well as in much of the developing world. Various practices in natural hazard governance in South Africa are alluded to. Particular attention is given to the disaster risks of the country as well as to the various natural hazards that drive this risk profile. Statutory and legislative aspects are discussed through a multisectoral approach, and by citing a number of case studies, we show the application of natural hazard governance in South Africa. Certain remaining challenges are highlighted that are faced by the South Africa government such as a lack of political will at the local government level, deficits in risk governance, difficulties in resource allocation, a lack of intergovernmental relations, and a need for enhanced community participation, ownership, and decision making.
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
Masculinities and Disaster
Scott McKinnon
Gender plays a role in all phases of the disaster cycle, from the lived experience of disaster survivors to the development of disaster risk reduction (DRR) policy and practice. Early research into the entanglement of gender and disaster revealed how women are made more vulnerable to disaster impacts by sexist and misogynist social structures. Researchers have since identified women’s central roles in building disaster resilience and aiding community recovery. Feminist scholarship has been highly influential in disasters research, prompting consideration of how intersecting social characteristics, including gender, sexuality, race, class, and bodily ability each contributes to the social construction of disaster.
Drawing on work in the field of critical men’s studies, a small but growing body of research has engaged with the role of gender in men’s disaster experiences, as well as how hegemonic masculinity shapes emergency management practice, constructs widely understood disaster narratives, and influences the development of DRR policy, including policies related to the crisis of climate change. Rather than a fixed identity, hegemonic masculinity operates as a culturally dominant ideal to which men and boys are expected to strive. It is spatially constituted and relational, often defined by attributes including physical strength, bravery, and confidence.
To date, the most substantial focus of research into masculinity and disasters relates to the lived and bodily experience of men impacted by wildfire. Australian researchers in particular have identified ways in which hegemonic ideals increase the disaster vulnerability of men, who feel pressure to act with bravery and to exhibit emotional and physical strength in conditions of extreme danger. Expectations of stoicism and courage equally impact men’s recovery from disaster, potentially limiting opportunities to access necessary support systems, particularly in relation to mental health and emotional well-being.
Hegemonic masculine ideals similarly impact the experiences of frontline emergency workers. Emergency management workplaces are often constructed as masculine spaces, encouraging high-risk behaviors by male workers, and limiting opportunities for participation by people of other genders. Male dominance in the leadership of emergency management organizations also impacts policy and practice, including in the distribution of resources and in attentiveness to the role of gender in the disaster experiences of many survivors.
Dominant disaster narratives, as seen in movies and the news media, contribute to the idea that disaster landscapes are ideal places for the performance of hegemonic masculine identities. Male voices dominate in media reporting of disasters, often leaving invisible the experiences of other people, with consequences for how disasters are understood by the wider public. Common tropes in Hollywood cinema similarly depict disasters as masculine events, in which brave cisgender men protect vulnerable cisgender women, with people of other genders entirely invisible.
Identifying and addressing the role of masculinities in disaster is increasingly important within the crisis of global heating. As climate change increases the frequency and intensity of disasters, new ways of engaging with the environment and constructing DRR policy has become more urgent. Research in this field offers a critical baseline by which to move beyond binary gender definitions and to address damaging masculine ideals that ultimately harm the environment and people of all genders.
Article
The Health–Disaster Risk Interface 1970–2020: Evolution, (Dis)Articulation, and Realignment
Ailsa Holloway
While the health sector’s operational role in emergencies and disasters is well- acknowledged and respected, health has also contributed substantially to the historical, conceptual, and methodological maturation of the disaster risk domain, especially since the 1970s. From 1970 to 2020, this evolution of the health–disaster risk knowledge interface can be understood through four phases. The first, from the late 1970s until 1989, was characterized by a surge in emergency health responses across a succession of disasters triggered by hydrometeorological and geophysical processes as well as humanitarian emergencies. The 1970–1989 period also saw the establishment of new health-specific emergency architectures and knowledge domains. The second phase, from 1990 until the early 2000s, was substantially influenced by global mechanisms, including the United Nations designation of the 1990s as the International Decade for Natural Disaster Reduction. The third phase, emerging in the early 2000s, profiled the changing global configuration of risk and disaster, with disaster impacts, including health effects, becoming more pronounced in high-income countries. The onset of the fourth phase was signaled by the 2015 global landmark agreements: the Sendai Framework for Disaster Risk Reduction, the Paris Agreement on climate change, and the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development.
The Sendai Framework for Disaster Risk Reduction is recognized for exceeding the scope of its predecessor agreements by foregrounding health as an integral concern of disaster risk reduction. Health’s enhanced visibility through the Sendai Framework was paralleled by other processes that reinforced understanding of the health–disaster risk interface. These included initiatives on One Health and Planetary Health, as well as growing awareness of the health implications of climate change.
This synergistic potential of the health–disaster risk knowledge interface draws from the strong conceptual alignment across both domains. This reflects explicit coherence between the core concept of “health determinants” (the social, physical, and other forces) that shape health outcomes and the disaster risk-related concepts of hazard, vulnerability, exposure, and capacity, which similarly configure disaster risk.
Since 2015, recognition of the significance of this alignment has accelerated efforts to promote more resilient health systems as well as cross-field initiatives such as Health Emergency and Disaster Risk Management. With hazard processes, especially those linked to climate extremes, exacting increased demands on health care systems, there is urgency for even greater innovation at the health–disaster risk knowledge interface.
Article
Understanding the Risk Communication Puzzle for Natural Hazards and Disasters
Emma E. H. Doyle and Julia S. Becker
The study of risk communication has been explored in several diverse contexts, from a range of disciplinary perspectives, including psychology, health, media studies, visualization studies, the public understanding of science, and social science. Such diversity creates a puzzle of recommendations to address the many challenges of communicating risk before, during, and after a natural hazard event and disasters.
The history and evolution of risk communication across these diverse contexts is reviewed, followed by a discussion of risk communication particular to natural hazards and disasters. Example models of risk communication in the disaster and natural hazard context are outlined, followed by examples of studies into disaster risk communication from Aotearoa New Zealand, and key best practice principles for communicating risk in these contexts. Considerations are also provided on how science and risk communication can work together more effectively in future in the natural hazard and disaster space.
Such considerations include the importance of scientists, risk managers, and officials communicating to meet a diversity of decision-makers’ needs and understanding the evolution of those needs in a crisis across time demands and forecast horizons. To acquire a better understanding of such needs, participatory approaches to risk assessment and communication present the greatest potential in developing risk communication that is useful, useable, and used. Through partnerships forged at the problem formulation stage, risk assessors and communicators can gain an understanding of the science that needs to be developed to meet decision-needs, while communities and decision-makers can develop a greater understanding of the limitations of the science and risk assessment, leading to stronger and more trusting relationships.
It is critically important to evaluate these partnership programs due to the challenges that can arise (such as resourcing and trust), particularly given risk communication can often occur in an environment subject to power imbalances due to social structures and sociopolitical landscape. There is also often not enough attention paid to the evaluation of the risk communication products themselves, which is problematic because what we think is being communicated may unintentionally mislead due to formatting and display choices. By working in partnership with affected communities to develop decision-relevant communication products using evidence-based product design, work can be done toward communicating risk in the most effective, and ethical, way.
Article
Children, Youth, and Disaster
Alice Fothergill
Children and youth are greatly affected by disasters, and as climate instability leads to more weather-related disasters, the risks to the youngest members of societies will continue to increase. Children are more likely to live in risky places, such as floodplains, coastal areas, and earthquake zones, and more likely to be poor than other groups of people. While children and youth in industrialized countries are experiencing increased risks, the children and youth in developing countries are the most at risk to disasters.
Children and youth are vulnerable before, during, and after a disaster. In a disaster, many children and youth experience simultaneous and ongoing disruptions in their families, schooling, housing, health and access to healthcare, friendships, and other key areas of their lives. Many are at risk to separation from guardians, long-term displacement, injury, illness, and even death. In disaster planning, there is often an assumption that parents will protect their children in a disaster event, and yet children are often separated from their parents when they are at school, childcare centers, home alone, with friends, and at work. Children do not have the resources or independence to prepare for disasters, so they are often reliant on adults to make evacuation decisions, secure shelter, and provide resources. Children also may hide or have trouble articulating their distress to adults after a disaster. In the disaster aftermath, it has been found that children and youth—no matter how personally resilient—cannot fully recover without the necessary resources and social support.
Social location—such as social class, race, gender, neighborhood, resources, and networks—prior to a disaster often determines, at least in part, many of the children’s post-disaster outcomes. In other words, age intersects with many other factors. Girls, for example, are at risk to sexual violence and exploitation in some disaster aftermath situations. In addition, a child’s experience in a disaster could also be affected by language, type of housing, immigration status, legal status, and disability issues. Those living in poverty have more difficulties preparing for disasters, do not have the resources to evacuate, and live in lower quality housing that is less able to withstand a disaster. Thus, it is crucial to consider the child’s environment before and after the disaster, to realize that some children experience cumulative vulnerability, or an accumulation of risk factors, and that disasters may occur on top of other crises, such as drought, epidemics, political instability, violence, or a family crisis such as divorce or death.
Even as children and youth are vulnerable, they also demonstrate important and often unnoticed capacities, skills, and strengths, as they assist themselves and others before and after disaster strikes. Frequently, children are portrayed as helpless, fragile, passive, and powerless. But children and youth are creative social beings and active agents, and they have played important roles in preparedness activities and recovery for their families and communities. Thus, both children’s vulnerabilities and capacities in disasters should be a research and policy priority.
Article
Natural Hazards Governance in Nigeria
Steve I. Onu
Nigeria, like many other countries in sub–Saharan Africa, is exposed to natural hazards and disaster events, the most prominent being soil and coastal erosion, flooding, desertification, drought, air pollution as a result of gas flaring, heat waves, deforestation, and soil degradation due to oil spillage. These events have caused serious disasters across the country. In the southeast region, flooding and gully erosion have led to the displacement of communities. In the Niger Delta region, oil exploration has destroyed the mangrove forests as well as the natural habitat for fishes and other aquatic species and flora. In northern Nigeria, desert encroachment, deforestation, and drought have adversely affected agricultural production, thereby threatening national food security.
The federal government, through its agencies, has produced and adopted policies and enacted laws and regulations geared toward containing the disastrous effects of natural hazards on the environment. The federal government collaborates with international organizations, such as the World Bank, International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), International Fund for Agricultural Development (IFAD), Center for Infectious Disease Research (CIDR), United Nations Industrial Development Organization (UNIDO), United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP), United Nations High Commission for Refugees UNHCR, and non-governmental organizations (NGOs), to address disaster-related problems induced by natural hazards.
However, government efforts have not yielded the desired results due to interagency conflicts, corruption, low political will, and lack of manpower capacity for disaster management.
There is a need for a good governance system for natural hazards prevention and reduction in the country. This will require inter-agency synergy, increased funding of agencies, capacity building, and public awareness/participation.
Article
Natural Hazards Governance in India
Anshu Sharma and Sunny Kumar
India faces a very broad range of hazards due to its wide geoclimatic spread. This, combined with deep-rooted social, economic, physical, and institutional vulnerabilities, makes India one of the highest disaster-affected countries in the world. Natural hazards have gained higher visibility due to an increasing frequency and magnitude of their impact in recent decades, and efforts to manage disasters have been largely unable to keep pace with the growing incidences, scale, and complexities of disaster events.
A number of mega events between 1990 and 2005, including earthquakes, cyclones, floods, and a tsunami, created momentum in decision making to look at disasters critically and to push for a shift from response to mitigation and preparedness. While efforts were put in place for appropriate legislation, institution building, and planning, these processes were long drawn out and time and resource intensive. It has taken years for the governance systems to begin showing results on the ground.
While these efforts were being formulated, the changing face of disasters began to present new challenges. Between 2005 and 2015, a number of unprecedented events shook the system, underscoring the increasing variability and thus unpredictability of natural hazards as a new normal. Events in this period included cloudbursts and flash floods in the deserts, droughts in areas that are normally flood prone, abnormal hail and storm events, and floods of rare fury. To augment the shifting natural hazard landscape, urbanization and changing lifestyles have made facing disasters more challenging. For example, having entire cities run out of water is a situation that response systems are not geared to address.
The future will be nothing like the past, with climate change adding to natural hazard complexities. Yet, the tools to manage hazards and reduce vulnerabilities are also evolving to unprecedented levels of sophistication. Science, people, and innovations will be valuable instruments for addressing the challenges of natural hazards in the times ahead.
Article
Corruption and the Governance of Disaster Risk
David Alexander
This article considers how corruption affects the management of disaster mitigation, relief, and recovery. Corruption is a very serious and pervasive issue that affects all countries and many operations related to disasters, yet it has not been studied to the degree that it merits. This is because it is difficult to define, hard to measure and difficult to separate from other issues, such as excessive political influence and economic mismanagement. Not all corruption is illegal, and not all of that which is against the law is vigorously pursued by law enforcement. In essence, corruption subverts public resources for private gain, to the damage of the body politic and people at large. It is often associated with political violence and authoritarianism and is a highly exploitative phenomenon. Corruption knows no boundaries of social class or economic status. It tends to be greatest where there are strong juxtapositions of extreme wealth and poverty.
Corruption is intimately bound up with the armaments trade. The relationship between arms supply and humanitarian assistance and support for democracy is complex and difficult to decipher. So is the relationship between disasters and organized crime. In both cases, disasters are seen as opportunities for corruption and potentially massive gains, achieved amid the fear, suffering, and disruption of the aftermath. In humanitarian emergencies, black markets can thrive, which, although they support people by providing basic incomes, do nothing to reduce disaster risk. In counties in which the informal sector is very large, there are few, and perhaps insufficient, controls on corruption in business and economic affairs.
Corruption is a major factor in weakening efforts to bring the problem of disasters under control. The solution is to reduce its impact by ensuring that transactions connected with disasters are transparent, ethically justifiable, and in line with what the affected population wants and needs. In this respect, the phenomenon is bound up with fundamental human rights. Denial or restriction of such rights can reduce a person’s access to information and freedom to act in favor of disaster reduction. Corruption can exacerbate such situations. Yet disasters often reveal the effects of corruption, for example, in the collapse of buildings that were not built to established safety codes.
Article
Disaster and Response in an Experiment Called New Orleans, 1700s–2000s
Richard Campanella
As an urbanized river-dominated delta, New Orleans, Louisiana, ranks among the most experimental of cities, a test of whether the needs of a stable human settlement can coexist with the fluidity of a deltaic environment—and what happens when they do not.
That natural environment bestowed upon New Orleans numerous advantages, among them abundant fresh water, fertile soils, productive wetlands and, above all, expedient passage between maritime and continental realms. But with those advantages came exposure to potential hazards—an overflowing Mississippi River, a tempestuous Gulf of Mexico, sinking soils, eroding coasts, rising seas, biotic invasion, pestilence, political and racial discord, conflagration—made all the worse by the high levels of social vulnerability borne by all too many members of New Orleans’ population. More so than any other major metropolis on the North American continent, this history of disaster and response is about the future of New Orleans as much as it is about the past.
This article examines two dozen disasters of various types and scales, with origins oftentimes traceable to anthropogenic manipulation of the natural environment, and assesses the nature of New Orleans’ responses. It frames these assessments in the “risk triangle” framework offered by David Crichton and other researchers, which views urban risk as a function of hazard, exposure, and vulnerability. “Hazard” implies the disastrous event or trauma itself; “exposure” means human proximity to the hazard, usually in the form of settlement patterns, and “vulnerability” indicates individuals’ and communities’ ability to respond resiliently and adaptively—which itself is a function of education, income, age, race, language, social capital, and other factors—after having been exposed to a hazard.
Article
Intersectionality as a Forward-Thinking Approach in Disaster Research
Cassandra Jean, Tilly E. Hall, and Jamie Vickery
Disaster researchers, policymakers, and practitioners are confronted with the pressing need to understand and address how and why certain individuals and groups of individuals experience inequities leading up to, during, and postdisaster. These efforts must consider how to address such inequities through collaborative efforts toward intentional and systemic change. The use of intersectional approaches supports better analyze and critique of discriminatory and oppressive practices that disproportionately impact historically marginalized peoples, especially in the face of hazards and disasters. Intersectionality calls for understanding how different forms of privilege, power, and oppression interact and compound to create unequal socioeconomic outcomes across individuals and groups of individuals based on their identities (e.g., age, race, sexuality, and gender) and conditions (e.g., housing composition, immigration, and marital status). A review of inter- and multidisciplinary terrains of disaster studies shows that there are multifaceted utilities, capabilities, and advantages of adopting an intersectional approach. By considering historical discriminatory practices and the root causes of vulnerability, intersectionality highlights the systemic and institutionalized patterns that create precarious situations for some people while simultaneously protecting others. Intersectionality is also well suited to support insight into individuals’ capacities that affect their ability to prepare for, respond to, and recover from disastrous events, as well as assist them in avoiding or reducing risks that make them susceptible to disaster in the first place. However, intersectional approaches within disaster studies remain underutilized and, sometimes, superficially applied. Simplistic representations, the unequal attention given to certain intersections, and the domination of Western epistemologies must be attended to in order to challenge, disrupt, and diligently undo the interactions of systematic privilege, power, and oppression that render unequal disaster experiences and outcomes.
Article
Looking for the Disaster Behind an Earthquake in a Fishing Village in South Pacific Coast of Mexico
Rogelio Josue Ramos Torres
One of the central premises within the social construction of risk and disasters perspectives is that the latter are something different from the natural events or manifestations to which they usually are associated. From some theoretical proposals, it has been said that the notion of disaster can vary greatly from one society to another, in such a way that what is disastrous in one place is not in another. One way to separate the disaster from the natural event is to read it from the local realities and frameworks of meaning in which it is suffered, where the relationship and intersections between the social and the natural are essential.
On the other hand, to track a disaster can be done based on the way in which people historically perceive risk in their own context and how it is represented, in both daily life and critical moments. There, in these representations, aspects related to the problems or threats that affect their life, their environment, but also their group and social identity are usually reflected.
Bahía de Paredón is a fishing town in the southern Mexican Pacific that was hit by a major earthquake in September 2017, which caused serious damage and losses but, at the same time, also opened a “critical window” to observe, in this case through the social representations that emerged, the historical threats and vulnerabilities that society suffers the most. After recounting the material repercussions of the earthquake and confronting them with the fishermen’s testimonies, it is possible to understand, in a manner consistent with local history, what kinds of risks are perceived and the meaning of the representations at that juncture. These are both useful leads to know where and what the disaster is for that specific group of people.
Since it is a community with a strong presence of different churches, among Bahía de Paredón inhabitants, risk perceptions and their respective representations are both mediated by a religious dimension. Here, religion operates as a historical explanatory platform to face the mysteries or dangers that working at sea implied, but its influence also shapes social representations around those same dangers. This religious reaction was also clearly seen at the most critical moments during and after the earthquake, when many people appealed mainly to their own church looking for shelter and spiritual relief.
In the earthquake context, some of the risk perceptions related to material damages appeared as the continuity of older problems, affecting significantly local activities of daily life. But in social representations, the resignified use of certain elements or factors also appears as a source where fishermen find valuable forces to resist both those old problems and the critical moments caused by the earthquake.
In a broad view, water, whose problems are closely related to the deterioration process of the surrounding rivers and the sea where the fishermen work, presented as a major concern among the inhabitants of the bay. But it is also the water, in this case specifically the sea, where the old fishermen find the symbolic strength to face threats the size of an earthquake. Taking into account the history of the bay and the problems fishermen suffer, the representation of risk, in this case, can be interpreted as an emotional or a psychological mechanism to face the inexplicable but also, in a more complex reading, as a gesture of resistance against the processes that deplete or destroy the wealth or natural elements where fishermen used to find safety and whose recovery they claim from the symbolic level.
Article
Health Care Challenges After Disasters in Lesser Developed Countries
Joseph Kimuli Balikuddembe, Binhua Fu, and Jan D. Reinhardt
A public health disaster occurs when the adverse health effects of an event such as a natural hazard or threat exceed the coping capacity of the affected human population. The coping capacity of the affected population is hereby dependent on available resources including financial and human resources, health infrastructure, as well as knowledge, planning and organizational capabilities, and social capital. Disasters therefore disproportionally affect lesser resourced regions and countries of the world and pose specific challenges to their health systems as well as to the international humanitarian community in terms of dealing with mortality and injuries, communicable and noncommunicable disease, mental health effects, and long-term disability. Challenges for health care delivery in disaster situations in lesser resourced settings include deficiencies in the construction of resilient health care facilities, the lack of disaster response plans, shortage of specialized medical personnel, shortcomings regarding training in disaster response, and scarcity of resources such as medicines and portable medical devices and supplies. Other challenges include the absence of appropriate algorithms for the distribution of scarce resources; lack of coordination of medical teams and other volunteers; limited awareness of particular health issues such as mental health problems or disability and rehabilitation; and lack of plans for evacuation, sheltering, and continuation of treatment of those with preexisting health conditions. Many challenges lesser resourced settings face with regard to health care delivery after disasters such as the organization of mortality management, triage and treatment of the injured, or the delivery of rehabilitative and mental health care cannot be reduced to the lack of baseline resources in terms of health infrastructure, technology, and personnel but are related to the absence of proper planning for future disaster scenarios including implementation strategies and simulation exercises. This not only encompasses the formal drafting of disaster preparedness and response plans, contingency planning of hospitals, and the provision of disaster-related training to health personnel but also in particular the identification and involvement of the potentially and traditionally affected communities and especially vulnerable groups in all the process of disaster risk reduction.
Article
Disaster Risk Reduction and Climate Change Adaptation in South Asia
Mihir Bhatt, Ronak B. Patel, Kelsey Gleason, and Mehul Pandya
Both the impact and the frequency of natural disasters and extreme events in South Asia are steadily increasing due to growing exposure and vulnerability. These vulnerabilities are compounded by fast economic growth and an increase in natural disasters across the region. Disaster losses in South Asia are rising and are felt across many domains. From the formal to the informal economy, natural disasters have increasingly strong impacts in terms of lives lost, social impact, and impediments to growth. New challenges in disaster risk reduction are emerging due to an increase in the duration and frequency of natural disaster events attributable to climate change. Though both climate change adaptation and disaster risk reduction efforts exist to some degree throughout South Asia, integrating climate change adaptation into disaster risk reduction is critical to successful and inclusive growth of economies in the region. Challenges remain, and national and subnational governments are making some progress in policies aimed at both climate change adaptation and disaster risk reduction. However, many of these efforts are planned, designed, and implemented separately, with limited understanding of how disaster and climate risk are linked. Moreover, progress is hindered by poor understanding of how integration of these concepts can result in better governance of risk in South Asia. Additionally, political will, capacity constraints, and institutional barriers must be overcome. Efforts by the international community are making progress in unifying these concepts, yet gaps and challenges still exist. The benefits of converging climate adaptation and disaster risk reduction in Asia are significant, from minimizing climate-related losses to more efficient use of limited resources and more effective and sustainable development.
Article
Economics and Disaster Risk Management
Randrianalijaona Mahefasoa, Razanakoto Thierry, Salava Julien, Randriamanampisoa Holimalala, and Lazamanana Pierre
Economics is the science of wealth, the main objective of which is to satisfy human needs within the constraint of limited available resources. The production and consumption patterns of economic agents are examined in order to identify the most efficient and optimal ways of meeting needs. At the same time, redistribution problems have an important place in economic science, and they lead to questions of development and economic growth.
Since the 1990s, officially declared by the United Nations as the International Decade for Natural Disaster Reduction (IDNDR), the relatively frequent occurrence of devastating disasters, induced mainly by natural hazards but also by human activities, development efforts and economic growth have been seriously threatened. Poverty alleviation efforts undertaken by nations in the Global South and supported by international donors, as well as development outcomes worldwide, are suffering from disasters. The international community has become more and more aware of the need to systematically mainstream disaster risk reduction in development policy and strategy. Therefore, disaster risk reduction economics is becoming a priority and part of economics as a science. For more than three decades, based on risk assessment, risk prevention and mitigation strategies, including structural and nonstructural measures, such as but not limited to, risk retention and transfer, preparedness as well as ex-post activities such as response, recovery and reconstruction are using economic variables and tools since mid-2000s to become more efficient. Furthermore, protecting economic growth and development benefits is possible only if enough attention is given to risk science. From this perspective, risk science is becoming part of economics, as evidenced by the new branch called risk reduction economics, which is essential to the attainment of sustainable development goals and resilient societies.
Article
Megacity Disaster Risk Governance
James K. Mitchell
Megacity disaster risk governance is a burgeoning interdisciplinary field that seeks to encourage improved public decision-making about the safety and sustainability of the world’s largest urban centers in the face of environmental threats ranging from floods, storms, earthquakes, wildfires, and pandemics to the multihazard challenges posed by human-forced climate change. It is a youthful, lively, contested, ambitious and innovative endeavor that draws on research in three separate but overlapping areas of inquiry: disaster risks, megacities, and governance. Toward the end of the 20th century, each of these fields underwent major shifts in thinking that opened new possibilities for action. First, the human role in disaster risks came to the fore, giving increased attention to humans as agents of risk creation and providing increased scope for inputs from social sciences and humanities. Second, the scale, complexity, and political–economic salience of very large cities attained high visibility, leading to recognition that they are also sites of unprecedented risks, albeit with significant differences between rapidly growing poorer cities and slower growing affluent ones. Third, the concept of public decision-making expanded beyond its traditional association with actions of governments to include contributions from a wide range of nongovernmental groups that had not previously played prominent roles in public affairs. At least three new conceptions of megacity disaster risk governance emerged out of these developments. They include adaptive risk governance, smart city governance, and aesthetic governance. Adaptive risk governance focuses on capacities of at-risk communities to continuously adjust to dynamic uncertainties about future states of biophysical environments and human populations. It is learning-centered, collaborative, and nimble. Smart city governance seeks to harness the capabilities of new information and communication technologies, and their associated human institutions, to the increasingly automated tasks of risk anticipation and response. Aesthetic governance privileges the preferences of social, scientific, design, or political elites and power brokers in the formulation and execution of policies that bear on risks. No megacity has yet comprehensively or uniformly adopted any of these risk governance models, but many are experimenting with various permutations and hybrid variations that combine limited applications with more traditional administrative practices. Arrangements that are tailor-made to fit local circumstances are the norm. However, some version of adaptive risk governance seems to be the leading candidate for wider adoption, in large part because it recognizes the need to continuously accommodate new challenges as environments and societies change and interact in ways that are difficult to predict. Although inquiries are buoyant, there remain many unanswered questions and unaddressed topics. These include the differential vulnerability of societal functions that are served by megacities and appropriate responses thereto; the nature and biases of risk information transfers among different types of megacities; and appropriate ways of tackling ambiguities that attend decision-making in megacities. Institutions of megacity disaster risk governance will take time to evolve. Whether that process can be speeded up and applied in time to stave off the worst effects of the risks that lie ahead remains an open question.
Article
Gender-Based Violence and Disaster
Debra Parkinson
Gender-based violence (GBV) increases in disasters across the world. The extent of the increase is not consistently or accurately enumerated due to a number of factors: practical, methodological, ethical, and sociological. Nevertheless, 50 notable publications on GBV in disasters were identified in 14 single countries between 1993 and 2020, and 16 multicountry studies were identified between 1998 and 2018. Most publications in single countries were from the United States, while key multicountry publications were from the United Nations, the World Health Organization, and the International Federation of Red Cross. Evidence to support the hypothesis of increased violence against women after disaster grew from the late 1980s, although by 2008, the question of whether GBV increases in disasters was still considered to be unanswered. Hurricane Katrina in the United States presented new opportunities to study GBV, and between 2008 and 2010, key papers were published on disasters across the world, all articulating the link between disaster and GBV. A common theme in the literature on violence against women in disasters is that it is evident worldwide. In countries as diverse as Iran, Pakistan, Japan, and Australia—although predisaster recorded levels of GBV may differ—there are commonalities of victim blaming, women’s sacrifice, and excusing men’s violence. By 2018, evidence had accumulated. Triggers, though not causes, of GBV were identified. After disasters, there is unsafe or insecure housing; substance abuse; stress, trauma, grief, and loss; relationship problems; unemployment and economic pressures; complex bureaucratic processes regarding grants, insurance, and rebuilding; reduced informal and formal supports and services; restricted movement and transport options; and a changed community and a different life course. Less identified as an explanation for GBV in disasters is the role of patriarchy and male privilege in allowing male violence against women and children. Despite the greater attention to GBV in disasters during the early 21st century, including through the United Nations and the World Health Organiztion, research remains fragmented, and emergency management across the world fails to address GBV in any effective, coordinated, or systematic way. Disasters indeed offer an excuse for men’s violence against women, and the deep disinterest in its relevance to disaster planning, response, or recovery is evidence that GBV after disaster is not seen as important. Women do not speak easily of the violence against them. In disasters, there is enormous pressure on women not to speak of men’s violence—from family members, friends, police, and even health professionals. The urgency of disaster response, the valorization of male heroism, and the complexity of postdisaster trauma and suffering challenge our commitment to the notion that women and children always have the right to live free from violence. Some effective initiatives to address increased GBV in disasters have been developed and indicate some progress. Recommendations for take-up and tailoring of these, along with embedded policy and practice changes, are clear. Until there are effective action and censure from the emergency management sector, from the legal processes, and from society, the vicious circle—of disaster followed by increased GBV and strengthened patriarchal power—will continue.
12
