It is instructive to juxtapose two contrasting models of risk communication. The first views risk communication as a product that is packaged and transmitted, unmodified and intact, to a passive public. The second, a relational approach, views it as a process in which experts, the public, and agencies engage in open communication, regarding the public as an equal partner in risk communication. The second model has the benefit of taking advantage of the public’s local knowledge and ability to engage in risk communication themselves. Risk communication should be understood as more of a dynamic process, and less of a packaged object. An example of the relational model is found in Bangladesh’s Cyclone Preparedness Programme, which has incorporated the relational model in its disaster risk reduction training for community volunteers. Nevertheless, the two contrasting models, in practice, are never mutually exclusive, and both are needed for effective disaster risk prevention.
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Article
A Relational Approach to Risk Communication
Jing Zhu and Raul P. Lejano
Article
Benefit-Cost Analysis of Economic Resilience Actions
Adam Rose
Economic resilience, in its static form, refers to utilizing remaining resources efficiently to maintain functionality of a household, business, industry, or entire economy after a disaster strikes, and, in its dynamic form, to effectively investing in repair and reconstruction to promote accelerated recovery. As such, economic resilience is oriented to implementing various post-disaster actions (tactics) to reduce business interruption (BI), in contrast to pre-disaster actions such as mitigation that are primarily oriented to preventing property damage. A number of static resilience tactics have been shown to be effective (e.g., conserving scarce inputs, finding substitutes from within and from outside the region, using inventories, and relocating activity to branch plants/offices or other sites). Efforts to measure the effectiveness of the various tactics are relatively new and aim to translate these estimates into dollar benefits, which can be juxtaposed to estimates of dollar costs of implementing the tactics. A comprehensive benefit-cost analysis can assist public- and private sector decision makers in determining the best set of resilience tactics to form an overall resilience strategy.
Article
Community-Based Disaster Risk Reduction
Rajib Shaw
Community-based approaches existed even before the existence of the state and its formal governance structure. People and communities used to help and take care of each other’s disaster needs. However, due to the evolution of state governance, new terminology of community-based disaster risk reduction (CBDRR) has been coined to help communities in an organized way. Different stakeholders are responsible for community-based actions; the two key players are the local governments and civil society, or nongovernment organizations. Private sector and academic and research institutions also play crucial roles in CBDRR. Many innovative CBDRR practices exist in the world, and it is important to analyze them and learn the common lessons. The key to community is its diversity, and this should be kept in mind for the CBDRR. There are different entry points and change agents based on the diverse community. It is important to identify the right change agent and entry point and to develop a sustainable mechanism to institutionalize CBDRR activities. Social networking needs to be incorporated for effective CBDRR.
Article
Comparative Public Finance Approaches to Natural Hazards Management
Mohammed Alkhurayyif, Julie Winkler, Simon Andrew, and Skip Krueger
An important challenge of natural hazards is that they inflict the greatest total economic damage in large, developed countries, where wealth is aggregated, but they create the greatest economic impact in smaller and developing countries, where a disaster caused by a natural hazard can easily overwhelm a national government’s ability to respond and its economy to recover. Thus, a common understanding in the literature is that the fiscal effect of a natural hazard is a function of the size of the disaster relative to the size of a nation’s economy at the time of the disaster.
At the international level, the economic impact of disasters, for example, has been estimated to be US$2.9 trillion between 1998 and 2017, and approximately $945 billion of that occurred in the United States. With a 2019 gross domestic product (GDP) of $21 trillion, the total economic effect for those 20 years is close to 5% of the value of economic output for a single year. Developing country losses, on the other hand, can be overwhelming, especially as measured against the size of the economy. For example, Hurricane Maria’s impact on Dominica is estimated to have been approximately US$1.37 billion, which was equivalent to 225% of Dominica’s GDP.
While an appreciation for the connection between the size of a national economy and natural hazards is clearly critical, the literature points to a number of additional factors that are important to understand about how government financial conditions are affected by natural hazards and vice versa. Debates continue about the role of foreign direct investment, government and private debt levels, investments in education, and internationally sponsored protective actions and insurance pools in improving the resilience of smaller and developing countries to disasters. For example, structural approaches to understanding the linkage between disasters and economic development suggest that countries with a limited number of sources of income have economies that are more vulnerable to disasters than more diversified economies, which might suggest that fiscal policies designed to increase economic diversity are important. Neoclassical approaches, on the other hand, argue that economic recovery is slowed by government intervention in the economy, and suggest that the best way for developing economies to recovery quickly is to reduce the amount of regulation in the economy.
Whatever the theoretical approach, what remains most clear is the ongoing challenge of decoupling the emotional need to participate in responses to the human tragedy associated with disasters caused by natural hazards from the strategic imperative to invest in hazard mitigation at much higher rates globally and plan toward disaster risk reduction.
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
Cost-Effective Business Resilience Decision Making
Noah Dormady, Alfredo Roa-Henriquez, Chris Snider, and Adam Rose
Practitioners, scholars, and students engaged in the analysis or evaluation of natural hazard impacts, particularly those involved in quantifying economic disruptions, should understand basic analytical principles and best practices. Economic analysis of disasters is particularly challenging, and there are best practices that can be employed to address many of these measurement and quantification challenges, including survey-based empirical data collection and analysis techniques.
Once these challenges are considered, and an evaluation has been performed, another more difficult challenge occurs—how that information can be used to effectively and cost-effectively improve hazard resilience. This involves how businesses, organizations, and communities can then use those analyses and data to improve operations, improve resilience, and restore functionality at the lowest cost.
The choices a business makes in the aftermath of a disaster can play a key role in its ability to continue operating, as well as in its pace of recovery. Those operational decisions are critically important and must be informed by a complex set of factors beyond property damage alone. It is important that decision makers develop a set of evaluation criteria for quantifying business resilience, with an explicit focus on cost-effectiveness. This is important because, due to the wide-ranging nature of disaster impacts, many disrupted businesses pursue resilience actions for which costs exceed avoided losses. In other words, they spend more money to avoid losses than the value of those losses. Recent natural disaster data collection and analysis efforts from Hurricane Harvey and other major disasters reveal that many businesses respond to disasters in cost-effective ways, while others spend inefficiently on resilience actions or tactics.
It is important that society learns from the experiences of businesses affected by prior disasters, so that businesses, organizations, and communities can more effectively and cost-effectively respond to future disasters, prepare for hazards, and accelerate recovery when disasters strike. It is also important that these objective, data-driven decisions, which aim to avoid economic losses and hasten recovery, consider the role of insurance. Insurance policies, practices, and incentives can vary, and they can fundamentally alter the behavior of firms in responding to natural disasters.
As such, cost-effective business resilience decision making is multifaceted. It involves operational decisions in the presence of post-disaster constraints that impact the firm’s ability to produce its goods and services. It involves cost and investment considerations, dynamic decision making, and external opportunities and limitations associated with contractual, legal and regulatory, and insurance-related considerations.
Article
Disaster Management and Climate-Change Adaptation Using Traditional and Local Knowledge in the Pacific Islands
Patrick D. Nunn and Roselyn Kumar
Covering almost one-third of the earth’s surface, the region of the Pacific islands is subject to a range of environmental stressors—including those deriving from volcanoes and earthquakes, and of course those attributable to atmospheric and oceanic processes. Most people living on the islands, peppered across this vast ocean, occupy island coasts, where food and water are generally most readily obtainable but where the impacts of many hazards focus. While popularly viewed as particularly vulnerable to disasters and climate change, Pacific Islanders have evolved formidable bodies of traditional and local knowledge (TLK) that have enabled their survival on comparatively small islands often thousands of kilometers from continental shores. While it is largely place-specific, this TLK is wide-ranging. It includes ensuring water and food security (especially in the aftermath of disasters), predicting and surviving extreme events (especially tropical cyclones), creating traditional pharmacopoeias, learning how to sail across thousands of kilometers of open ocean, and developing cultural resilience that could be adapted to changing circumstances. Detailed accounts are given of the use of Pacific TLK in disaster management and in climate-change adaptation. While much TLK has been lost and has suffered from being overwhelmed by a flood of outsider (science-based) solutions, it remains a potent force among many rural communities in the Pacific islands. Owing to its demonstrable effectiveness, its place-based nature, and its ability to accommodate change, Pacific TLK should be at the heart of future plans for helping Pacific Islanders cope with future climate change.
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
Flood Resilient Construction and Adaptation of Buildings
David Proverbs and Jessica Lamond
Flood resilient construction has become an essential component of the integrated approach to flood risk management, now widely accepted through the concepts of making space for water and living with floods. Resilient construction has been in place for centuries, but only fairly recently has it been recognized as part of this wider strategy to manage flood risk. Buildings and the wider built environment are known to play a key role in flood risk management, and when buildings are constructed on or near to flood plains there is an obvious need to protect these. Engineered flood defense systems date back centuries, with early examples seen in China and Egypt. Levees were first built in the United States some 150 years ago, and were followed by the development of flood control acts and regulations. In 1945, Gilbert Fowler White, the so-called “father of floodplain management,” published his influential thesis which criticized the reliance on engineered flood defenses and began to change these approaches. In Europe, a shortage of farmable land led to the use of land reclamation schemes and the ensuing Land Drainage acts before massive flood events in the mid-20th century led to a shift in thinking towards the engineered defense schemes such as the Thames Barrier and Dutch dyke systems. The early 21st century witnessed the emergence of the “living with water” philosophy, which has resulted in the renewed understanding of flood resilience at a property level.
The scientific study of construction methods and building technologies that are robust to flooding is a fairly recent phenomenon. There are a number of underlying reasons for this, but the change in flood risk philosophy coupled with the experience of flood events and the long process of recovery is helping to drive research and investment in this area. This has led to a more sophisticated understanding of the approaches to avoiding damage at an individual property level, categorized under three strategies, namely avoidance technology, water exclusion technology, and water entry technology. As interest and policy has shifted to water entry approaches, alongside this has been the development of research into flood resilient materials and repair and reinstatement processes, the latter gaining much attention in the recognition that experience will prompt resilient responses and that the point of reinstatement provides a good opportunity to install resilient measures.
State-of-the-art practices now center on avoidance strategies incorporating planning legislation in many regions to prohibit or restrict new development in flood plains. Where development pressures mean that new buildings are permitted, there is now a body of knowledge around the impact of flooding on buildings and flood resilient construction and techniques. However, due to the variety and complexity of architecture and construction styles and varying flood risk exposure, there remain many gaps in our understanding, leading to the use of trial and error and other pragmatic approaches. Some examples of avoidance strategies include the use of earthworks, floating houses, and raised construction.
The concept of property level flood resilience is an emerging concept in the United Kingdom and recognizes that in some cases a hybrid approach might be favored in which the amount of water entering a property is limited, together with the likely damage that is caused. The technology and understanding is moving forward with a greater appreciation of the benefits from combining strategies and property level measures, incorporating water resistant and resilient materials. The process of resilient repair and considerate reinstatement is another emerging feature, recognizing that there will be a need to dry, clean, and repair flood-affected buildings. The importance of effective and timely drying of properties, including the need to use materials that dry rapidly and are easy to decontaminate, has become more apparent and is gaining attention.
Future developments are likely to concentrate on promoting the uptake of flood resilient materials and technologies both in the construction of new and in the retrofit and adaptation of existing properties. Further development of flood resilience technology that enhances the aesthetic appeal of adapted property would support the uptake of measures. Developments that reduce cost or that offer other aesthetic or functional advantages may also reduce the barriers to uptake. A greater understanding of performance standards for resilient materials will help provide confidence in such measures and support uptake, while further research around the breathability of materials and concerns around mold and the need to avoid creating moisture issues inside properties represent some of the key areas.
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
Hurricanes and Health
Caleb Dresser, Satchit Balsari, and Jennifer Leaning
Hurricanes, also referred to as tropical cyclones or typhoons, are powerful storms that originate over warm ocean waters. Throughout history, these storms have had lasting impacts on societies around the world. High winds, rain, storm surges, and floods affect lives, land, and livelihoods and have a variety of effects on human health.
The direct health impacts of hurricanes include drowning due to flooding and trauma resulting from storm surges, blown debris, and structural collapse. Systems for detection, forecasting, early warning, and communications can give populations time to make preparations before hurricane landfall. Evacuation, shelter use, and other preparedness efforts have reduced mortality from hurricanes in many parts of Asia and the Americas. Engineered defenses such as sea walls, flood barriers, and raised structures provide added protection in some settings. While effective in the medium term, such approaches are costly and require dedicated resources, and therefore they have not been implemented in many at-risk sites around the world.
Indirect health impacts of hurricanes arise from damage to housing, electricity, water, and transportation infrastructure, and from effects on social supports, economies, and healthcare systems. Indirect health impacts can include infectious diseases, carbon monoxide poisoning, trauma sustained during cleanup, mental health effects, exacerbations of chronic disease, and increases in all-cause mortality. Indirect and long-term health consequences are poorly understood because dedicated study of specific impacts has occurred in only a handful of settings, and, given the diverse array of societies and geographies affected by hurricanes, it is unclear how generalizable the results of these studies may be.
Policy makers face three interlinked challenges in protecting human health from hurricanes. First, climate change is leading to increased hazards in many locations by altering hurricane dynamics and contributing to sea-level rise. Second, patterns of intensifying coastal settlement and development are expected to increase population exposure. Third, unequal patterns of exposure and impact on specific populations will continue to raise issues of climate and environmental injustice.
Situationally appropriate strategies to protect health from future storms will vary widely, as they must both address the locally relevant manifestations of hurricane hazards and adapt to the cultural and economic context of the affected population. In some areas, inexorable ocean encroachment may lead to consideration of managed retreat from high-risk coastlines; in others, the presence of very large coastal urban populations that cannot feasibly evacuate may lead to design and use of vertical shelters for temporary protection during storms. New ideas and programs are urgently needed in many settings to address hazards associated with extreme rainfall, rising seas on floodplains and low-lying islands, landslide risk in areas undergoing rapid deforestation, and structurally unsound housing in some urban settings. Policies to reduce greenhouse gas emissions will help reduce long-term risk from hurricanes and sea-level rise.
Without concrete actions to address both hurricane hazards and population vulnerabiliy, the 21st century may be marked by increasingly dangerous hurricanes affecting growing coastal populations that will be left with few viable options for seeking safety.
Article
Introduction to Socio-Ecological Resilience
Vincenzo Bollettino, Tilly Alcayna, Philip Dy, and Patrick Vinck
In recent years, the notion of resilience has grown into an important concept for both scholars and practitioners working on disasters. This evolution reflects a growing interest from diverse disciplines in a holistic understanding of complex systems, including how societies interact with their environment. This new lens offers an opportunity to focus on communities’ ability to prepare for and adapt to the challenges posed by natural hazards, and the mechanism they have developed to cope and adapt to threats. This is important because repeated stresses and shocks still cause serious damages to communities across the world, despite efforts to better prepare for disasters.
Scholars from a variety of disciplines have developed resilience frameworks both to guide macro-level policy decisions about where to invest in preparedness and to measure which systems perform best in limiting losses from disasters and ensuring rapid recovery. Yet there are competing conceptions of what resilience encompasses and how best to measure it. While there is a significant amount of scholarship produced on resilience, the lack of a shared understanding of its conceptual boundaries and means of measurement make it difficult to demonstrate the results or impact of resilience programs.
If resilience is to emerge as a concept capable of aiding decision-makers in identifying socio-geographical areas of vulnerability and improving preparedness, then scholars and practitioners need to adopt a common lexicon on the different elements of the concept and harmonize understandings of the relationships amongst them and means of measuring them. This article reviews the origins and evolution of resilience as an interdisciplinary, conceptual umbrella term for efforts by different disciplines to tackle complex problems arising from more frequent natural disasters. It concludes that resilience is a useful concept for bridging different academic disciplines focused on this complex problem set, while acknowledging that specific measures of resilience will differ as different units and levels of analysis are employed to measure disparate research questions.
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
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
Natech Emergency Preparedness and Response
Georgios Marios Karagiannis
Industrialization, urbanization, and climate change are all increasing the risk from Natech events in the world. Hazardous materials incidents present a significant threat to life and property, involve high values at risk and political sensitivities, cross jurisdictional boundaries, require numerous kinds and types of resources, entail complex strategies and tactics, may be affected by weather, and are relatively non-routine. They can thus be quite complex in and of themselves, even without the occurrence of natural hazards. Because of the confluence of natural disasters and industrial facilities involving hazardous substances, Natech events may pose additional challenges, including the compromise of response capabilities, multiple incidents occurring simultaneously, poor access, utility damage, and evacuation constraints and limitations.
As with all emergencies, a Natech response cannot be improvised. Improving Natech response capabilities requires enhanced preparedness efforts. Risk assessments should consider the impact of natural hazards in industrial facilities using or storing hazardous substances. This kind of analysis should allow planners to determine the specific capabilities and activities to respond to and recover from Natech incidents. Once the required capabilities have been determined, communities will need to determine the best way to build the additional capabilities required given funding limitations.
Emergency planning for Natech incidents should not be done in isolation but should be integrated in all-hazards, jurisdiction-wise planning. A hybrid approach, which combines planning based on scenario, function, and capabilities, is recommended. Collaborative planning helps individuals and organizations understand their roles, as well as the roles and contributions of other organizations, which ultimately leads to successful operations. Therefore, the first milestone in the planning process is to form a collaborative team, including facility owners or operators as early as possible in the process. Emergency planners are also advised to consider the potential of science and technology for improving preparedness efforts and response capabilities. Furthermore, exercise practitioners designing natural disaster exercises should consider including Natech events in scenarios to add realism and explore response capabilities.
In a Natech emergency, data are frequently incomplete and can even be contradictory, so responders should be as conservative as practicable so that they can protect both themselves and the public. Technical specialists for both hazardous materials and natural hazards should be integrated early in the incident command structure. Phasing the operation to protect resources, by keeping them out of the hazard zone, may be a useful strategy in some weather-related emergencies. Emergency managers should also consider how Natech evacuations may disrupt evacuations stemming from the need to protect people from a natural hazard. And first responders should consider a mix of offensive, defensive, and passive tactics.
Article
Natural Hazards and Public Health in Urban Areas
Mary C. Sheehan
The world’s cities face natural hazards that expose their large, concentrated populations to health, safety, and well-being risks. The most important of these hazards in the urban context can be grouped into several categories: meteorological and hydrological, including extreme heat, flooding, and drought; environmental, including air pollution and wildfires; and geological, including earthquakes. Multiple natural hazards may affect an urban area simultaneously or in sequence, while any hazard may create a cascading interaction with the urban built environment. This produces the potential for what has been called “connected hazard events.” While earthquakes and extreme heat may lead to the deadliest urban disasters, connected hazard events contribute substantially to the full health burden of urban natural hazards. Thus, human activity—including rapid urbanization, biodiversity loss, and climate change—is increasing the frequency, severity, and complexity of many natural hazard-triggered disasters.
Public health risk from natural hazards in urban areas is determined by the type of hazard; the extent and nature of population exposure; population vulnerability factors such as age, health status, housing quality, economic well-being, and social conditions; and the capacity of urban systems to cope, adapt and learn. Populations in cities of all sizes and income categories face natural hazards. Among those at highest risk are urban dwellers in the coastal cities of Asia and Africa, and in the informal settlements of the world’s largest cities. While cities in wealthier countries report greater value of assets damaged in hazard events, those in lower income countries report more lives lost, and more people affected by injury, illness, or displacement. Policy and practice strategies for disaster risk reduction and climate change adaptation can reduce the risks and enhance the capacity of city dwellers. Risk and vulnerability assessments, hazard monitoring and mapping, early warning systems, health preparedness and response, nature-based solutions, and population health surveillance are among the strategies with a growing evidence base. Involving city public health agencies can strengthen their impact. Enhanced collaboration of public health and urban planning; more consistent metrics, monitoring, and research, particularly in the most vulnerable low- and middle-income country cities; and developing a culture of preparedness are opportunities to reduce health risks from natural hazards in urban areas.
Article
Natural Hazards and Risk Management
Ljubica Mamula-Seadon
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 hazards risk management has developed in conjunction with broader risk management theory and practice. Thus, it reflects a discourse that has characterized this field, particularly in the last decades of the 20th century. Effective implementation of natural hazards risk management strategies requires an understanding of underlying assumptions inherent to specific methodologies, as well as an explication of the process and the challenges embodied in specific approaches to risk mitigation.
Historical thinking on risk, as it has unfolded in the last few hundred years, has been exemplified by a juxtaposition between positivist and post-positivist approaches to risk that dominated the risk discourse in the late 20th century. Evolution of the general concept of risk and the progress of scientific rationality modified the relationship of people to natural hazard disasters. The epistemology, derived from a worldview that champions objective knowledge gained through observation and analysis of the predicable phenomena in the world surrounding us, has greatly contributed to this change of attitude. Notwithstanding its successes, the approach has been challenged by the complexity of natural hazard risk and by the requirement for democratic risk governance. The influence of civic movements and social scientists entering the risk management field led to the current approach, which incorporates values and value judgments into risk management decision making. The discourse that generated those changes can be interpreted as positivist vs. post-positivist, influenced by concepts of sustainability and resilience, and generating some common principles, particularly relevant for policy and planning. Examples from different countries, such as New Zealand, illustrate the strengths and weaknesses of the current theory and practice of natural hazards risk management and help identify challenges for the 21st century.
Article
Natural Hazards and Supply Chain
Tinglong Dai and Christopher S. Tang
The relationship between natural hazards and supply chain operations is bidirectional: Natural hazards can disrupt supply chain operations, and supply chain operations can influence the causes of natural hazards. The former motivates us to discuss four key steps for managing supply chain risk in the presence of these hazards: (a) identifying risk, (b) assessing risk, (c) mitigating risk, and (d) responding to risk events. The latter prompts us to examine how the environmental, social, and governance movement—a set of standards and practices aimed at creating positive social and environmental impacts—can prompt companies to rethink their supply chain operations to reduce emissions, mitigate the human impact of natural disasters, and mobilize their supply chain partners to combat climate change. Developing supply chains that are resilient to natural hazards requires a collective and collaborative effort among all stakeholders.
Article
Natural Hazards and Threats: A Blessing in Disguise Hypothesis
Peter Nijkamp, Alexandru Banica, and Karima Kourtit
In the context of the increasing frequency and coverage of natural and manmade hazards and disasters worldwide and their relation to climate change, more and more approaches in resilience studies highlight not just the importance of bouncing back but also the idea of bouncing forward to a higher quality or superior equilibrium state. Building upon an evolutionary approach to resilience, two emerging concepts, prosilience and antifragility, further embrace the positive perspective. The “blessing in disguise” hypothesis suggests that natural threats and disasters can have long-term positive outcomes on regions and cities. However, the recovery process is often challenging, and behavioral and policy responses highly influence the recovery trajectories. Firstly, the literature primarily focuses on quantifying the economic, and to some extent, social and equity impacts of natural disasters, but to a lesser extent, the environmental impact and the overall systemic outcomes. Secondly, there is still little research on the drivers of economic systems disrupted by disasters, and there is little consensus on what it takes not just to return to their initial state but to have an even better long-term performance. After synthesizing the previous quantitative techniques and models to analyze the impact of natural disasters, one should highlight that a positive outcome after a disaster depends on the capacities and capabilities of territories, which encompasses coping with, recovering from, and adapting to a shock and the intelligent transformation of the affected areas. Urban areas, especially large cities, concentrate most of the world’s population and are subject to the highest threats and disasters. Global cities also have the highest capacity and capability to use these events as opportunities for innovation and adaptation. However, the approaches of cities are not similar but highly depend on the mixture and magnitude of the threats or hazards and each city’s intrinsic systemic characteristics (including economic, social, environmental, infrastructural, cultural, and institutional components). Empirical illustrations highlight the spatial differences and typologies of threats and hazards that determine different responses and possibilities for cities to “bounce forward.” A high number of indicators regarding the capabilities of cities are put in relation to the economic risk (to gross domestic product) induced by extreme events. Although the differences between cities from developed and developing countries are well emphasized, improving disaster management makes cities safer and healthier overall. It can also produce sustainable economic growth and increase well-being in the long run. A comprehensive and proactive approach to disaster management is essential, encompassing long-term resilience strategies, spatial considerations, and climate change adaptation. By recognizing the interconnectedness of hazards and the systemic nature of cities, decision-makers can develop targeted intervention policies and effective strategies that promote resilience, sustainability, and well-being in the face of dynamic and uncertain challenges.
Article
Natural Hazards, Climate Change, and Indigenous Knowledge and Stewardship: Moving Toward a Resilience-Based Model
William Nikolakis, Victoria Gay, Russell Myers Ross, and Aimee Nygaard
The increased frequency and intensity of natural hazards associated with climate change represents a major risk to Indigenous peoples . Yet, the existing vulnerability-based model of natural hazard mitigation and adaptation is reactive and largely treats Indigenous peoples as “vulnerable”—passive actors, whose knowledge and stewardship are typically ignored. To meaningfully mitigate and adapt to the increasing impacts of changing climates, a transformation is required towards a proactive and holistic resilience-based model, grounded in Indigenous knowledge and stewardship. A resilience-based model empowers Indigenous peoples to proactively steward their lands towards health as the primary goal, thus reducing ecosystem vulnerability, and in doing so, community members strengthen their connection to the land and enhance their identity and agency, with documented positive health and well-being outcomes.
Transitioning to a resilience-based approach requires structured learning and action-based approaches that treat resilience as both a process and an outcome, and strengthened in a positive cycle. Four interdependent elements are important to catalyze a resilience-based approach: (a) devolving stewardship to Indigenous Peoples , guided by Indigenous knowledge; (b) strengthening localized governance, in ways consistent with local values; (c) adequately resourcing stewardship and governance; and (d) monitoring and evaluating stewardship using “transdisciplinary” approaches that draw from Indigenous and Western knowledge systems in respectful ways, and to guide stewardship.
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