Facing Hazards and Disasters Understanding Human Dimensions (2006) / Chapter Skim
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6 International Research:Confronting the Challenges of Disaster Risk Reduction and Development
6 International Research:Confronting the Challenges of Disaster Risk Reduction and Development
Pages 216-247
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From page 216... ...
Further, 85 percent of people exposed to natural disasters reside in countries of medium or low economic development (Munich Re, 2002)
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From page 217... ...
GLOBAL PATTERNS IN DISASTER RISK AND VULNERABILITY Understanding global patterns of disaster risk entails a review of key concepts of development that address the vulnerability of human communities. Use of these concepts to model relationships between risk and development requires reliable data across disaster events and cultures.
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From page 218... ...
218 FACING HAZARDS AND DISASTERS economic entitlements, but not in the severity of the physical characteristics of natural disaster events such as drought or floods. Other lines of research focus on the importance of natural systems and the effects of system change on disaster risk.
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From page 219... ...
Thus a key research and public policy issue is the link between poverty and vulnerability to disasters. The committee addresses this issue by placing disasters in the context of sustainable development.
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From page 220... ...
What Is Sustainable Development? By the turn of this century, hazards and disaster management had become energized by the challenges of achieving the goal of sustainable development.
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The United Nations Commission on Sustainable Development (2001:2) recently stated the linkage between disasters and sustainability succinctly: Can sustainable development, along with the international instruments aiming at poverty reduction and environmental protection, be successful without taking into account the risks of natural hazards and their impacts?
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From page 222... ...
. It is possible to understand how several of the underlying principles of sustainable development outlined by the United Nation's Agenda 21, the first United Nation's agenda for action on sustainability, can be applied to disasters (Sitarz, 1993)
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From page 223... ...
At the same time, global processes may be affected by local land-use decisions that support greater dependence on automobiles and increased CO2 emissions, which contribute to global climate change. As scale changes, the disaster mitigation tools change.
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From page 224... ...
Both phenomena -- the new scale and dynamism -- make megacities highly vulnerable not only to natural hazards but also to technological hazards and terrorist attacks. Such agglomerations are highly complex and have major risks, which present significant challenges.
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From page 225... ...
The primary objective of development organizations is economic growth and improving the ability of poor countries to cope with the challenges of poverty and underdevelopment. The underlying rationale was that project investment decisions should focus on immediate concerns associated with poverty and that investments would produce more resources to be available for disaster reduction.
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From page 226... ...
At first, it was assumed that more disaster relief from developed countries was needed. In response, annual worldwide development funding among donor countries grew dramatically during the 1980s and up to the peak year of 1992; however, economic losses expanded dramatically during the same period (UNDP, 2004)
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From page 227... ...
Theories of human response have been borrowed unreflectively from natural disasters and applied to the very different phenomena that occur in the context of CPEs (Green and Ahmed, 1999)
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228 FACING HAZARDS AND DISASTERS contrast, famine and drought intertwined with persistent conflict have not been salient topics to most in the Western disaster research and policy communities. In sum, the preceding discussion identified three major obstacles to the integration of sustainable development with disaster preparedness and mitigation efforts: low visibility of disaster issues in the sustainable development debate; exclusion of sustainable development in the international humanitarian aid delivery system; and historical exclusion of CPEs from the definition of disasters by the research community.
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From page 229... ...
Efforts are successful when the disaster mitigation and preparedness program is responsive to household needs and builds the strength of organizations so that they are capable of achieving program goals. That is, a high degree of "fit" among program design, local needs, and capacities of assisting organizations increases the chances of successful programs that link disaster to development.
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From page 230... ...
The idea of social capital can be used to develop a more refined definition of these links and a deeper understanding of how they are formed. Social capital has recently been given prominence by the United Nations Development Programme, which set forth the concept as a central guidance framework for using aid to mobilize communities to deal with disasters and underdevelopment (UNDP, 2004)
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From page 231... ...
, but organizational interaction and social capital are not equivalent. A nongovernmental organization charged with disaster mitigation responsibilities may have many community contacts, but if people are not participating and not attending meetings, the contacts do not benefit the community.
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From page 232... ...
232 FACING HAZARDS AND DISASTERS Civic Engagement -citizen interaction (amount and quality) -volunteer activity in the community -participation in community activities -use of community facilities -informal interaction outside community -voluntary activity outside community -participation in activities outside community -use of facilities outside community Social Networks -network size (how many people?
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From page 233... ...
Consequently, the likelihood of external programs fitting local needs and capacities to undertake collective action to advance disaster resilience initiatives is very low. In societies with weak state administrative and judicial structures, notably in developing countries, weak vertical ties dominate and undermine formation of horizontal relations.
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234 FACING HAZARDS AND DISASTERS tion, and dependence that characterize societies with weak state structures. This poor state of vertical relations between patrons and clients (or local people)
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From page 235... ...
Moreover, Type III communities and especially Type IV communities are likely to experience many of the conditions of CPEs that are in a constant state of conflict and extreme polarization. To demonstrate the conceptual and practical significance of this parsimonious model of horizontal and vertical integration, three case studies of local experiences in linking disasters to development issues aimed at supporting disaster resiliency (see Sidebar on linking development to disaster resiliency supported by the National Earthquake Hazards Reduction Program [NEHRP]
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From page 236... ...
. Before the 1989 Loma Prieta earthquake, Santa Cruz County could be classified as a Type II community.
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Under the 1991 Resource Management Act the new lead national planning agency, the Ministry for the Envi ronment, opposed the city's program and instead took an antiregulatory, free market approach to land development. As the memory of the disaster faded, local commitment waned, and without national support, local consensus for long-range risk management planning disintegrated.
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study of local implementation of national (and state) hazard mitigation policies in Australia, New Zealand, and Florida offers useful insights that begin to answer these questions.
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What roles should community development planners and emergency managers play to build social capital in these situations? Bollens' (2002)
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Although it was traumatic and caused untold human suffering, the devastating 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami disaster offers a unique opportunity to apply multiple case designs that capture relationships among horizontal integration, vertical integration, and dimensions of social capital NEHRP Exemplars The National Earthquake Hazards Reduction Program (NEHRP) has supported several studies that exemplify the benefits and importance of collaborative international research.
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Taiwan is vulnerable to earthquakes and typhoons (whose secondary hazards are floods and landslides) whereas HRRC was funded by the Texas Division of Emergency Management for work on hurricanes and by NEHRP (through NSF)
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From page 242... ...
A second challenge is the need to identify appropriate research counterparts. As discussed in Chapter 9, the social science hazards and disaster research community is small, even in the United States, which can be considered a world leader in this area.
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From page 243... ...
It was also multidisci plinary, involving investigators from earthquake engineering, the earth sciences, and the social sciences. A common risk management model originally developed in New Zealand and Australia was used as a mechanism to further the integration of project activities, which included research on such topics as hazard and vulner ability assessment, structural mitigation, and urban disaster planning.
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From page 244... ...
When the number of casual factors to be examined is greater than three or four, the small-scale case approach is inadequate. Recommendation 6.1: Priority should be given to international disaster research that emphasizes multiple case research designs, with each case using the same methods and variables to ensure comparability.
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From page 245... ...
Furthermore, in the past decade, national governments throughout the world have been experimenting with decentralized local planning approaches to disaster mitigation and preparedness (United Nations Commission on Sustainable Development, 2001; UNDP, 2004)
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From page 246... ...
For example, NSF support for U.S.-Japan collaboration over at least two decades has fostered long-term relationships between the hazards research communities in the two countries. As social scientists have become more involved in the U.S.-Japan activities (e.g., through bilateral workshops)
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INTERNATIONAL RESEARCH 247 U.S. investigators in international hazards and disaster research.
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