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.
Article
Changing Disaster Vulnerability and Capability in Aging Populations
Jennifer Whytlaw and Nicole S. Hutton
Article
Flood Risk Analysis
Bruno Merz
Floods affect more people worldwide than any other natural hazard. Flood risk results from the interplay of a range of processes. For river floods, these are the flood-triggering processes in the atmosphere, runoff generation in the catchment, flood waves traveling through the river network, possibly flood defense failure, and finally, inundation and damage processes in the flooded areas. In addition, ripple effects, such as regional or even global supply chain disruptions, may occur.
Effective and efficient flood risk management requires understanding and quantifying the flood risk and its possible future developments. Hence, risk analysis is a key element of flood risk management. Risk assessments can be structured according to three questions: What can go wrong? How likely is it that it will happen? If it goes wrong, what are the consequences? Before answering these questions, the system boundaries, the processes to be included, and the detail of the analysis need to be carefully selected.
One of the greatest challenges in flood risk analyses is the identification of the set of failure or damage scenarios. Often, extreme events beyond the experience of the analyst are missing, which may bias the risk estimate. Another challenge is the estimation of probabilities. There are at most a few observed events where data on the flood situation, such as inundation extent, depth, and loss are available. That means that even in the most optimistic situation there are only a few data points to validate the risk estimates. The situation is even more delicate when the risk has to be quantified for important infrastructure objects, such as breaching of a large dam or flooding of a nuclear power plant. Such events are practically unrepeatable. Hence, estimating of probabilities needs to be based on all available evidence, using observations whenever possible, but also including theoretical knowledge, modeling, specific investigations, experience, or expert judgment. As a result, flood risk assessments are often associated with large uncertainties. Examples abound where authorities, people at risk, and disaster management have been taken by surprise due to unexpected failure scenarios. This is not only a consequence of the complexity of flood risk systems, but may also be attributed to cognitive biases, such as being overconfident in the risk assessment. Hence, it is essential to ask: How wrong can the risk analysis be and still guarantee that the outcome is acceptable?
Article
Natural Hazards Governance in Mexico
Elizabeth Mansilla
As a result of the earthquakes that occurred in September 1985 and their human and material consequences, disaster care in Mexico became institutionalized and acquired the rank of public policy when the first national civil protection law was published years later. More than 30 years after the creation of the National Civil Protection System, there have been some important advances; however, they have not been translated into higher levels of safety for populations exposed to risk. On the contrary, the evidence shows that the country’s risk, as well as the number of disasters and associated material losses, increase year by year.
To a large extent, this stems from an approach based predominantly on post-disaster response by strengthening preparedness and emergency response capacities and creating financial mechanisms to address reconstruction processes, as opposed to broader approaches seeking to address the root causes of risk and disasters. Post-disaster actions and reconstruction processes have failed to achieve acceptable levels of efficiency, and disorganization and misuse of resources that should benefit disaster-affected populations still prevails.
Article
Natural Hazards Governance: An Overview of the Field
Thomas A. Birkland
The field of natural hazards governance has changed substantially since the 1970s as the breadth and severity of natural hazards have grown. These changes have been driven by greater social scientific knowledge around natural hazards and disasters, and by changes in structure of natural hazards governance. The governance of issues relating to natural hazards is challenging because of the considerable complexity inherent in preparing for, responding to, mitigating, or recovering from disasters.
Article
Linking Hazard Vulnerability, Risk Reduction, and Adaptation
Jörn Birkmann and Joanna M. McMillan
The concepts of vulnerability, disaster risk reduction and climate change adaptation are interlinked. Risk reduction requires a focus not just on the hazards themselves or on the people and structures exposed to hazards but on the vulnerability of those exposed. Vulnerability helps with the identification of root causes that make people or structures susceptible to being affected by natural and climate-related hazards. It is therefore an essential component of reducing risk of disasters and of adapting to climate change.
The need to better assess and acknowledge vulnerability has been recognized by several communities of thought and practice, including the Disaster Risk Reduction (DRR) and Climate Change Adaptation (CCA) communities. The concept of vulnerability was introduced during the 1980s as a way to better understand the differential consequences of similar hazard events and differential impacts of climate change on different societies or social groups and physical structures. Since then, the concept gradually became an integral part of discourses around disaster risk reduction and climate change adaptation. Although the history of the emergence of vulnerability concepts and the different perspectives of these communities mean the way they frame vulnerability differs, the academic discourse has reached wide agreement that risk—and actual harm and losses—are not just caused by physical events apparently out of human control but primarily by what is exposed and vulnerable to those events.
In the international policy arena, vulnerability, risk, and adaptation concepts are now integrated into the global agenda on sustainable development, disaster risk reduction, and climate change. In the context of international development projects and financial aid, the terms and concepts are increasingly used and applied. However, there is still too little focus on addressing underlying vulnerabilities.
Article
Palaeotsunamis
James Goff
How big, how often, and where from? This is almost a mantra for researchers trying to understand tsunami hazard and risk. What we do know is that events such as the 2004 Indian Ocean Tsunami (2004 IOT) caught scientists by surprise, largely because there was no “research memory” of past events for that region, and as such, there was no hazard awareness, no planning, no risk assessment, and no disaster risk reduction. Forewarned is forearmed, but to be in that position, we have to be able to understand the evidence left behind by past events—palaeootsunamis—and to have at least some inkling of what generated them.
While the 2004 IOT was a devastating wake-up call for science, we need to bear in mind that palaeotsunami research was still in its infancy at the time. What we now see is still a comparatively new discipline that is practiced worldwide, but as the “new kid on the block,” there are still many unknowns. What we do know is that in many cases, there is clear evidence of multiple palaeotsunamis generated by a variety of source mechanisms. There is a suite of proxy data—a toolbox, if you will—that can be used to identify a palaeotsunami deposit in the sedimentary record. Things are never quite as simple as they sound, though, and there are strong divisions within the research community as to whether one can really differentiate between a palaeotsunami and a palaeostorm deposit, and whether proxies as such are the way to go. As the discipline matures, though, many of these issues are being resolved, and indeed we have now arrived at a point where we have the potential to detect “invisible deposits” laid down by palaeotsunamis once they have run out of sediment to lay down as they move inland. As such, we are on the brink of being able to better understand the full extent of inundation by past events, a valuable tool in gauging the magnitude of palaeotsunamis.
Palaeotsunami research is multidisciplinary, and as such, it is a melting pot of different scientific perspectives, which leads to rapid innovations. Basically, whatever is associated with modern events may be reflected in prehistory. Also, palaeotsunamis are often part of a landscape response pushed beyond an environmental threshold from which it will never fully recover, but that leaves indelible markers for us to read. In some cases, we do not even need to find a palaeotsunami deposit to know that one happened.
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
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
Hazards, Social Resilience, and Safer Futures
Lena Dominelli
The concepts of hazards and risks began in engineering when scientists were measuring the points at which materials would become sufficiently stressed by the pressures upon them that they would break. These concepts migrated into the environmental sciences to assess risk in the natural terrain, including the risks that human activities posed to the survival of animals (including fish in streams) and plants in the biosphere. From there, they moved to the social sciences, primarily in formal disaster discourses. With the realization that modern societies constantly faced risks cushioned in uncertainties within everyday life, the media popularized the concept of risk and its accoutrements, including mitigation, adaptation, and preventative measures, among the general populace. A crucial manifestation of this is the media’s accounts of the risks affecting different groups of people or places contracting Covid-19, which burst upon a somnambulant world in December 2019 in Wuhan, China. The World Health Organization (WHO) declared Covid-19 a pandemic on March 11, 2020. Politicians of diverse hues sought to reassure nervous inhabitants that they had followed robust, scientific advice on risks to facilitate “flattening the curve” by spreading the rate of infection in different communities over a longer period to reduce demand for public health services.
Definitions of hazard, risk, vulnerability, and resilience evolved as they moved from the physical sciences into everyday life to reassure edgy populations that their social systems, especially the medical ones, could cope with the demands of disasters. While most countries have managed the risk Covid-19 posed to health services, this has been at a price that people found difficult to accept. Instead, as they reflected upon their experiences of being confronted with the deaths of many loved ones, especially among elders in care homes; adversities foisted upon the disease’s outcomes by existing social inequalities; and loss of associative freedoms, many questioned whether official mitigation strategies were commensurate with apparent risks.
The public demanded an end to such inequities and questioned the bases on which politicians made their decisions. They also began to search for certainties in the social responses to risk in the hopes of building better futures as other institutions, schools, and businesses went into lockdown, and social relationships and people’s usual interactions with others ceased. For some, it seemed as if society were crumbling around them, and they wanted a better version of their world to replace the one devastated by Covid-19 (or other disasters). Key to this better version was a safer, fairer, more equitable and reliable future. Responses to the risks within Covid-19 scenarios are similar to responses to other disasters, including earthquakes, volcanic eruptions, wildfires, tsunamis, storms, extreme weather events, and climate change. The claims of “building back better” are examined through a resilience lens to determine whether such demands are realizable, and if not, what hinders their realization. Understanding such issues will facilitate identification of an agenda for future research into mitigation, adaptation, and preventative measures necessary to protect people and the planet Earth from the harm of subsequent disasters.
Article
Fatalism, Causal Reasoning, and Natural Hazards
John McClure
Fatalism about natural disasters hinders action to prepare for those disasters, and overcoming this fatalism is one key element to preparing people for these disasters. Research by Bostrom and colleagues shows that failure to act often reflects gaps and misconceptions in citizen’s mental models of disasters. Research by McClure and colleagues shows that fatalistic attitudes reflect people’s attributing damage to uncontrollable natural causes rather than controllable human actions, such as preparation. Research shows which precise features of risk communications lead people to see damage as preventable and to attribute damage to controllable human actions. Messages that enhance the accuracy of mental models of disasters by including human factors recognized by experts lead to increased preparedness. Effective messages also communicate that major damage in disasters is often distinctive and reflects controllable causes. These messages underpin causal judgments that reduce fatalism and enhance preparation. Many of these messages are not only beneficial but also newsworthy. Messages that are logically equivalent but are differently framed have varying effects on risk judgments and preparedness. The causes of harm in disasters are often contested, because they often imply human responsibility for the outcomes and entail significant cost.
Article
Collective Choices Affecting Natural Hazards Governance, Risk, and Vulnerability
Thomas Thaler, David Shively, Jacob Petersen-Perlman, Lenka Slavikova, and Thomas Hartmann
The frequency and severity of extreme weather events are expected to increase due to climate change. These developments and challenges have focused the attention of policymakers on the question of how to manage natural hazards. The main political discourse revolves around the questions of how we can make our society more resilient for possible future events. A central challenge reflects collective choices, which affect natural hazards governance, risk, and individual and societal vulnerability. In particular, transboundary river basins present difficult and challenging decisions at local, regional, national, and international levels as they involve and engage large numbers of stakeholders. Each of these groups has different perspectives and interests in how to design and organize flood risk management, which often hinder transnational collaborations in terms of upstream–downstream or different riverbed cooperation. Numerous efforts to resolve these conflicts have historically been tried across the world, particularly in relation to institutional cooperation. Consequently, greater engagement of different countries in management of natural hazards risks could decrease international conflicts and increase capacity at regional and local levels to adapt to future hazard events. Better understanding of the issues, perspectives, choices, and potential for conflict, and clear sharing of responsibilities, is crucial for reducing impacts of future events at the transboundary level.
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.
