Towards Disaster Risk Reduction

A Policy-Focused Approach to Natural Hazards and Disasters

Jason K. Levy, Chennat Gopalakrishnan

• Publisher: Taylor & Francis
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN: 9781138377776
• eBook ISBN: 9781317850090
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Biological Sciences
• Subtopic: Ecology
• Index: Biological Sciences

This book constitutes a landmark attempt to address, comprehensively and in-depth, a policy-focused approach to the many timely and important issues associated with building a culture of disaster prevention and disaster risk reduction. This book not only provides key insights into the field of natural hazard and disaster studies but also assesses the causes, perspectives, and consequences of natural disasters, as well as providing a global survey of post-recovery policies. The contributions found herein discuss disaster risk reduction strategies and policies for managing the unexpected and cascading impacts of natural disasters. A particular focus is placed on transboundary catastrophes that cross policy domains, geographic, political, and sectoral boundaries. Since the disaster management and natural resources policy research field draws on a diverse range of paradigms and influences, the book includes case histories, empirical studies, conceptual-theoretical investigations, policy perspectives, institutional analysis, and risk analyses. The role of human culture, disaster psychology and environmental monitoring are examined in depth. Deficiencies and inequalities in local, national, and global disaster response are also discussed. Original strategies for reducing disaster risk are put forward and the prospects for a major change in the direction of global policy on disasters.

This book was published as a special issue of the Journal of Natural Resources Policy Research.

Introduction: A Policy-Focused Approach to Natural Hazards and Disasters – Towards Disaster Risk Reduction (DRR)

JASON K. LEVY* & CHENNAT GOPALAKRISHNAN**

*Homeland Security and Emergency Preparedness, L. Douglas Wilder School of Government, Virginia Commonwealth University, Richmond, VA, USA; **Department of Natural Resources and Environmental Management, University of Hawaii at Manoa, Honolulu, HI, USA

While the fields of disaster, crisis, and emergency studies have made great strides over the past century (Alexander, 1993; Mileti, 1999; Prince, 1920; Quarantelli, 1998; White, 1942), the international relief community is currently being pushed to the brink by the unparalleled intensity, frequency, and scale of natural disasters and catastrophes. In 2009 alone, 335 natural disasters occurred worldwide, killing 10 655 persons, disrupting the lives of 119 million others and causing over US$41.3 billion economic damages, with Asia accounting for 89.1% of global reported natural disaster victims and more than a third of total worldwide economic damages (Vos et al., 2010). In 2005, Hurricane Katrina alone displaced more than a quarter of a million Gulf Coast citizens, damaged a land area equal to the United Kingdom, destroyed 300 000 homes, and cost $US200 billion (Duncan & Brebbia, 2009). Striking in the most populated area of the country, the 2010 Haiti earthquake affected approximately 3 million people with a reported death toll of 230 000 and 300 000 injured (BBC News, 2010). In 2008 alone there were 235 000 deaths due to natural disasters: cyclone Nagaris in Myanmar killed 138 366 people, while the Sichuan earthquake in China killed 87 476 people (Vos et al., 2010).

Clearly, the death toll of recent ‘mega-disasters’ has been staggering. The United Nations has rated the August 2010 floods in Pakistan as the greatest humanitarian crisis in recent history, with more people affected than by the 2004 Boxing Day South-East Asian tsunami and the recent earthquakes in Kashmir and Haiti combined. UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-Moon has requested additional urgent aid to Pakistan because the floods have already affected an area roughly the size of Italy, disrupted the lives of a tenth of its 170 million population, left two million homeless, and killed approximately 1600, amid fears that disease outbreaks could spread since survivors are sleeping in makeshift tarpaulin tents. These events highlight the fact that natural, health-related and technologic disasters are on the rise worldwide, including statistically-probable but unanticipated catastrophes as well as moderate-scale repetitive events. Global climate variability and change, infectious disease epidemics and catastrophic deforestation pose additional long-term challenges to ecological integrity and global population health. For example, rising sea levels currently pose a threat to more than half a billion people that live within 5 m above sea level around the world. Sea-level rise is an ongoing and accelerating process and the communities of some islands and deltaic coasts are unable to retreat inland from the coast. The number of global ‘environmental refugees’ facing involuntary relocation is expected to reach 50 million by 2010, with small, low-lying island populations at the greatest risk (Potter, 2008). For example, in the Pacific nation of Tuvalu, a ring of nine Polynesian islands, several thousand people have already left for other nations due to the loss of land.

The five papers in this special issue constitute a major attempt to address, comprehensively and in-depth, a policy-focused approach to the many timely and important issues associated with building a culture of disaster prevention and disaster risk reduction. This special issue emphasizes that devastation and loss allows for new opportunities to manage disaster risk in ways characterized by adaptation, transformation and resilience: traditional plans and policies for mitigating disaster losses are inadequate and so decision-makers must understand how natural hazards impact their communities and the policy frameworks in which they are managed. This special issue not only provides key insights into the field of natural hazard and disaster studies but also assesses the causes, perspectives, and consequences of natural disasters, as well as providing a global survey of post-recovery policies. The five contributions found herein discuss disaster risk reduction strategies and policies for managing the unexpected and cascading impacts of natural disasters. A particular focus is placed on transboundary catastrophes that cross policy domains, geographic, political, and sectoral boundaries. Since the disaster management and natural resources policy research field draws on a diverse range of paradigms and influences, the five papers featured include case histories, empirical studies, conceptual-theoretical investigations, policy perspectives, institutional analysis, and risk analyses.

This special issue investigates current gaps in our knowledge about managing natural hazards with the aim of opening new research avenues for integrated disaster risk management, from a policy perspective. Accordingly, this collection includes cross-disciplinary and transnational papers that examine the causes and consequences of natural disasters, with a special emphasis on crafting comprehensive disaster policy solutions to effectively address them. Key topics discussed include: adaptive management of natural disasters, risk and vulnerability assessments, and the implementation of disaster mitigation policies. Trends in the frequency and impacts of disasters in both developed and developing nations are examined and explanations for these calamities are advanced. The role of human culture, disaster psychology, and environmental monitoring are examined in depth. Deficiencies and inequalities in local, national, and global disaster response are also discussed. Original strategies for reducing disaster risk are put forward and the prospects for a major change in the direction of world policy on disasters are assessed.

In the first paper, Alexander provides a comprehensive analysis, with general lessons extracted, of short- to medium-term disaster policies (i.e. regarding emergency management, temporary resettlement, and initial stages of permanent recovery). Specifically, the author describes the impact of the earthquake that struck the central Italian city of L’Aquila on 6 April 2009, killing 308 people and leaving 67 500 homeless. The pre-impact, emergency, and early recovery phases are discussed in terms of the nature and effectiveness of government policy. Disaster risk reduction in Italy is evaluated in relation to the structure of civil protection and changes wrought by both the L’Aquila disaster and public scandals connected with the misappropriation of funds. Six important lessons (see below) are derived from this analysis and related to disaster risk reduction (DRR) needs both in Italy and elsewhere in the world. Policy analysis is provided with respect to earthquake prediction in Italy. The value of short-term earthquake forecasts is discussed.

Alexander identifies six important policy lessons of the L’Aquila earthquake disaster. First, whether short-term earthquake predictions are official or amateur, the precautionary principle should be employed. Second, monitoring and warning systems must be backed by robust and local emergency response mechanisms. Third, it is necessary to augment, not supplant, local disaster response with external assistance. This requires an integrated system of emergency response. Fourth, safeguards against corruption and abuse need to be instituted; civil protection must necessarily have both recourse to emergency powers as well as democratic underpinnings. Fifth, in most disaster response and emergency management systems, there is a tension between centrism and devolution. Finally, the price of progress is eternal vigilance: disaster reduction gains made in one year can be reversed in another when budgets are cut and programmes are reduced.

In the next paper, Kousky discusses the use of natural capital to reduce disaster risk. The author emphasizes that natural capital can be used to reduce disaster losses (i.e. wetlands store floodwaters and mangroves buffer storm surge) and is hence an important disaster management tool. Over the past half century key contributions have been made to the fields of natural capital, poverty, and disaster risk (Wisner et al., 1976), the social sciences and natural hazards (Wright & Rossi, 1981), collective behaviour and disaster research (Wenger, 1985), and the ‘human ecological perspective’ to hazards. To complement our growing scientific understanding of disaster probabilities and consequences, Kousky calls attention to the policy process of using natural capital over more traditional risk management approaches. Lower costs and co-benefits can attract policy-makers to use the natural capital approach, and a variety of policy mechanisms exist for achieving disaster risk reduction.

Kousky’s paper reviews the enlightening experience of several vanguard US communities that are employing natural systems to mitigate disaster risks. The paper concludes with a discussion of the motivations for using the natural capital approach (as opposed to other risk reduction measures), the policy approaches for doing so, and the political and institutional challenges involved. Four potential challenges to adopting the use of natural capital for disaster risk reduction are identified: lack of information, uninterested decision-makers, political opposition, and institutional biases and inertia. Communities have effectively found ways around these challenges, however, by taking advantage of triggering events, working with dedicated public entrepreneurs, and turning to potentially new methods, such as multi-stakeholder negotiation.

In the third paper, Balagh and Buchenrieder discuss the resilience of formal and informal instruments to natural and man-made shocks which result in income or consumption volatility. For example, in the event of a drought event, affected households employ various formal and informal instruments with the aim of achieving responsive outcomes such as consumption smoothing (Holzmann et al. 2003) or asset smoothing (Zimmerman & Carter 2003; Carter et al. 2007). Balagh and Buchenrieder note that informal arrangements describe the bundle of measures taken at the household or community level to protect against risks (or to combat shocks) in the absence or presence of public or market-based arrangements. Examples include the buying and selling of real assets (such as cattle and gold), informal borrowing, crop diversification, storage, and arrangements for community support. Next, the authors describe formal instruments: market and public actions against precedented and unprecedented risks or shocks. The term ‘risk’ is used when referring to uncertain (i.e. stochastic) events and outcomes with known or unknown probabilistic distributions (IFPRI, 2002; Sricharoen, 2006).

Using empirical evidence, the authors argue that clear evidence does not support the superiority of formal instruments over informal responses to covariate shocks. To the contrary, the authors propose that the dynamic response of informal instruments to aggregate shocks is often misunderstood and underestimated. The paper concludes with suggestions on pertinent research issues and future work in order to better explain the role of informal structures in managing shocks. The expected outcomes of this research include more robust disaster management plans capable of coping with a rapidly changing environment. Balagh and Buchenrieder conclude by emphasizing the importance of promoting disaster management education and incorporating the principles of disaster risk reduction and social disaster resilience into the broader issues of ecosystems integrity and sustainable livelihoods.

In the next paper, Levy describes the theory and practice of drama theory for managing disasters and improving natural resources policy research. A formal group decision and negotiation framework known as Drama Theory II (DT II) is put forth in order to improve environmental disaster modelling and analysis. The author investigates the natural, health-related, and man-made challenges facing Louisiana’s indigenous Gulf Coast tribes that have lived on the bayous of the Mississippi delta for centuries. A mathematical treatment of key drama-theoretic concepts (i.e. positions, intentions, doubts, and dilemmas) is provided, the dynamics of the drama-theoretic process are discussed, and theoretical results are applied to the oil spill disaster in the US Gulf Coast. It is shown that DT II successfully models emotional responses during a disaster in order to improve strategic decision-making and reduce disaster risk.

Levy notes that there are several key distinctions between drama theory and game theory with respect to disaster management: DT II...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Citation Information
• 1. Introduction: A Policy-Focused Approach to Natural Hazards and Disasters – Towards Disaster Risk Reduction (DRR)
• 2. The L’Aquila Earthquake of 6 April 2009 and Italian Government Policy on Disaster Response
• 3. Using Natural Capital to Reduce Disaster Risk
• 4. The Dynamics of Informal Responses to Covariate Shocks
• 5. Negotiation Support for Environmental Disaster Management: Drama Theory II and the Survival of Louisiana’s Indigenous Gulf Coast Tribes
• 6. A Gap Hazard Analysis: Initiating Policy Development with Mountainous Communities
• Index