Search results for "Disaster risk reduction"
showing 10 items of 22 documents
Decision Support for Disaster Risk Management: Integrating Vulnerabilities into Early-Warning Systems
2014
International audience; Despite the potential of new technologies and the improvements of early-warning systems since the 2004 Tsunami, damage and harm caused by disasters do not stop to increase. There is a clear need for better integrating the fragmented landscape of researchers and practitioners working on different aspects of decision support for disaster risk reduction and response. To demonstrate and discuss the advantages of integrated systems, we will focus in this paper on vulnerabilities and early-warning systems. While vulnerabilities are mostly used to allocate risk management resources (preparedness), early-warning systems are designed to initiate the response phase. Indicator …
The impact on disaster governance of the intersection of environmental hazards, border conflict and disaster responses in Ladakh, India
2018
Abstract The Indian border region of Ladakh, in Jammu and Kashmir State, has a sensitive Himalayan ecosystem and has experienced natural hazards and disasters of varying scales over the decades. Ladakh is also situated on a fault-line of multiple tensions, including ongoing border disagreements and intermittent conflict with China and Pakistan. The Indian army has thus become a permanent fixture in the region. This paper examines the implications of the intersection of these environmental and security factors for disaster governance in the region. Using Social Domains theory, the paper argues first, that a hazard-centred paradigm of ‘universal’ disaster science emerges from the colonial per…
Informal Disaster Governance
2020
<p>Scholars and practitioners are increasingly questioning formal disaster governance (FDG) approaches as being too rigid, slow, and command-and-control driven. Too often, local realities and non-formal influences are sidelined or ignored to the extent that disaster governance can be harmed through the efforts to impose formal and/or political structures. A contrasting narrative emphasises so-called bottom-up, local, and/or participatory approaches which this article proposes to encapsulate as Informal Disaster Governance (IDG). This article theorises IDG and situates it within the long-standing albeit limited literature on the topic, paying particular attention to the literature’s fa…
Governance through Economic Paradigms: Addressing Climate Change by Accounting for Health
2016
"Climate change is a major challenge for sustainable development, impacting human health, wellbeing, security, and livelihoods. While the post-2015 development agenda sets out action on climate change as one of the Sustainable Development Goals, there is little provision on how this can be achieved in tandem with the desired economic progress and the required improvements in health and wellbeing. This paper examines synergies and tensions between the goals addressing climate change and economic progress. We identify reductionist approaches in economics, such as 'externalities', reliance on the metric of the Gross Domestic Product, positive discount rates, and short-term profit targets as so…
Linking Disaster Risk Reduction and Healthcare in Locations with Limited Accessibility: Challenges and Opportunities of Participatory Research
2020
Disaster risk reduction and healthcare support each other, including the mitigation of further harm after illness or injury. These connections are particularly relevant in locations which have permanent or temporary limited accessibility. In these circumstances, people are required to be self-sufficient in providing emergency and long-term healthcare with limited resources. Planning and preparing to mitigate further harm after illness or injury from disasters (disaster risk reduction) must include people living and working in locations with limited accessibility, meaning that participatory research can be used. The challenges and opportunities of enacting participatory research in such cont…
Critiquing and Joining Intersections of Disaster, Conflict, and Peace Research
2020
AbstractDisaster research, conflict research, and peace research have rich and deep histories, yet they do not always fully intersect or learn from each other, even when they investigate if and how disasters lead to conflict or peace. Scholarship has tended to focus on investigating causal linkages between disaster (including those associated with climate change) and conflict, and disaster diplomacy emerged as a thread of explanatory research that investigates how and why disaster-related activities do and do not influence peace and conflict. However, definitive conclusions on the disaster-conflict-peace nexus have evaded scientific consensus, in part due to conceptual, methodological, and …
Universal Design of Information Sharing Tools for Disaster Risk Reduction
2019
International audience; Disaster information sharing tools are an important aspect of disaster resilience, and it is of utmost importance that these tools are accessible and usable for as many potential users as possible. In this paper, we evaluate the accessibility of a selection of tools for crowdsourcing disaster situation information. As our evaluation shows that the selected tools are not fully accessible, we provide recommendations for mitigation, as well as highlight the importance of further research in this area.
Helices of disaster memory: How forgetting and remembering influence tropical cyclone response in Mauritius
2020
Abstract Tropical cyclones have had a considerable impact on Mauritius. Large cyclones are relatively rare, and in popular imagination are thought to hit Mauritius every 15 years. Yet it has been over 25 years since the last cyclone widely considered as ‘significant’. Critically, there is little known about the role of memory in responses to cyclones and details regarding responses to past cyclones in Mauritian history are scant. This article examines past experiences and impacts of cyclones in Mauritius, as well as contemporary perceptions of cyclone vulnerability and memories of historical cyclones. The analysis draws on both community interviews and archival research conducted in Mauriti…
Community Resilience to Cyclone Disasters in Coastal Bangladesh
2016
Bangladesh is one of the poorest and most disaster-prone countries in the world. To address both problems simultaneously, sustainable livelihoods (SL) could be better connected with disaster risk reduction (DRR). For this purpose, one initiative implemented in Bangladesh is called the Vulnerability to Resilience (V2R) programme which ran from 2013 to 2016. This programme was primarily initiated and funded by the British Red Cross in a consortium with the Swedish Red Cross and the German Red Cross. This article presents the first evaluation of the V2R programme with three objectives. The first objective was to measure whether the selected communities have achieved community resilience charac…
Disaster Risk Reduction for All? Understanding Intersectionality in Disaster Situations
2021
When designing digital services for citizens in a disaster situation, the diversity of its audience and their particular needs are not always sufficiently taken into account. Variables like digital equipment available, environment, disabilities, socio-economic status, etc., play a significant role in people’s ability to access and exchange important information through digital means. In this paper, we will examine some factors that lead to this inequality, and we see that they tend to boil down to a lack of awareness or focus on the diversity of the population, and this affects not only people with disabilities, but also other disadvantaged groups. More broadly, we will examine this in term…