Disadvantages Of Disaster Risk

natural disasters). Gallup et al. (2003, pp.41, 46) have estimated that natural disasters in Latin America over the last 30 years have cost up to $3.3 billion and in extreme disasters costs can reach 10 per cent of a country’s GDP. This, coupled with the fact that they suffer regularly from natural disasters due to their location, means that they find it harder to recover from them. The destruction of crops causes vast economic loss which cannot be regained as farmers rely on monoculture. Furthermore, many buildings in developing countries are often built from weak materials which causes mass destruction and costly re-construction which these countries cannot afford.

Hazards are activities or events that cause loss of life, injury, property damage, social and economic disruption, or environmental degradation. These hazards can be natural or manmade, such as earthquakes, hurricanes, tornadoes, floods, wildfires, and terrorist attacks. Vulnerabilities can be described as the potential for hazards. Vulnerabilities can be such things as geographical locations, a community up north has a lower vulnerability for hurricanes, as compared to Florida communities. Risk is described as the level of protection a community or area will have if they are involved in a hazard, and the certain groups

The natural environment is, of course, not “getting its revenge”. Geophysical, meteorological, and hydrologic processes are unfolding as they have for millennia, beginning long before humans occupied the earth and continuing to the present. Given the eons-long perspective of the natural environment, it would be very difficult to identify meaningful changes in event frequency for the short time period in which scientific records are available on geological, meteorological, and hydrological phenomena. Event frequency, from an emergency management perspective, is not really the issue. It is certainly true that, over the years, more people have been affected by natural disasters and losses are becoming progressively greater. The significant feature driving these observations, however, is the extent of human encroachment into hazard prone areas. With increasing population density and changing land use patterns, more people are exposed to natural hazards and consequently our accumulated human and economic losses are increasing. Much of this exposure is a matter of choice. Sometimes people choose hazardous places, building houses on picturesque cliffs, on mountain slopes, in floodplains, near beautiful volcanoes, or along seismic faults. Sometimes people choose hazardous building materials that fail under extreme environmental stresses—for example, unreinforced masonry construction in seismically active areas. Some exposure results from constrained choices; the cheap land or

When disasters occur suddenly, the following days makes it difficult for people to get to work due to fallen trees or destroyed cars and home or roads flooded. By evaluating a given area or even country, can reduce these negative impacts by using risk identification, risk reduction and risk transfer. This is the important job of risk manager to do these risk assessments in order to better prepare for unfortunate events that will occur sometime in the future. There are public assistance programs set in place in the event of a disaster destroying a town or city for example.

With the current changes in weather patterns, strange climatic conditions and other uncontrollable natural disasters, there has been a lot of attention directed towards the mitigation of the negative effects such natural disasters can have on man and the society at large.

This year countries from around the world have been severely impacted by deadly natural disasters. For example, Hurricanes Harvey, Irma, and Maria created destruction and devastation to the Caribbean, Florida, and Texas. In south Asia, torrential rain and floods have affected millions. Mudslides and flooding have wrought

Imagine living your life on a regular day for you and BOOM! Your life is now suddenly completely changed, everything you thought was normal or part of you has changed. This is what natural disasters tend to make happen in your life, they affect us in many ways. In this essay i will discuss the various elements each author uses to express the causes and effects of disasters. The author Jacqueline Adam clearly expresses the causes and effects of disasters through the use of text structure, choice of vocabulary and use of data and details.

Disasters are totalizing events, impacting and influencing every aspect of a community when they occur. As the anthropology of disaster grows, both in the number of publications and the number of researchers, the scope of topics related to disasters will also grow. Economic implications, vulnerable populations, and human ecology already contribute heavily to the

An event is only correctly identified as a disaster when the damage is too great for an affected region or city to handle or respond to the event with their own resources. To be more direct, a disaster is an actual event that results in more disruption and losses than a community is capable of handling on their own and they must therefore rely on assistance from other communities, the state or federal government (Smith 2012). A disaster, regardless of the nature of the event, in one region or city, may not qualify as a disaster in another region or city. It is all based on the impacted area’s capability to cope with the event on their own.

According to the World Health Organization in 2002, vulnerability is defined as “the degree to which a population, individual or organization is unable to anticipate, cope with, resist and recover from the impacts of disasters (WHO.,2002). When discussing vulnerable populations, assessing reasons that may have placed these individuals under this category is vital in determining ways to increase their quality of life. The Center for Disease Control: Office of Minority Health & Health Equity (OMHHE) expounds upon this thought process of how certain qualities can cause one to become vulnerable by giving insight to different characteristics that may cause one to be considered vulnerable such as, “socio-economic status, geography, gender, age, disability

“We’ve never seen anything like this” is the word increasingly heard in every part of the world in the wake of natural disasters. Certainly, strong natural disasters have increased nearly four times over the past four decades. There have been observed 70% increase in damage by floods and streams. According to recent UN report, Economic losses from disasters since 2000 are in range of $2.5 trillion, almost 50% higher than previous international estimates. The economic losses from disaster sometimes occur out of control and require partnership with private sector. The losses from earthquake and cyclonic wind damage are expected to be about $180 billion per year throughout this century- and this figure doesn’t include damage from floods, rockslides,

Data obtained by assessing social vulnerability must be implemented within each phase of the emergency management process; mitigation, response, and recovery. First, to effectively respond and recover from incidents emergency management agencies must concentrate on the mitigation phase to prevent incidents from happening in the first place. This is achieved through a thorough hazard/vulnerability analysis (HVA). This type of analysis assesses the risk of physical, economic, and social vulnerability within all communities of a given jurisdiction (Lindell et al., 2006, p. 165). Additionally, the basis of the HVA allows emergency managers to effectively plan for disaster by creating pre-planned responses to disasters (rather than improvised response) and staging resources to locations with the highest probability of risk; ultimately contributing to the mitigation and response phases.

Due to diverse geo-climatic conditions prevalent in different parts of the globe, different types of natural disasters like floods, droughts, earthquakes, cyclones, landslides, and volcanoes etc may strike according to the vulnerability of the area.

As the Marxist approach puts it, “underlying states of human marginalisation are conceived as the principle cause of disaster.” (Pelling, 2001, p. 179). This resource exclusion to particular categories of people within society creates their vulnerability to risk, and in turn disaster. McLaughlin and Dietz (2007) suggest there are three dimensions that make up vulnerability including exposure, sensitivity and resilience. An example displaying the vulnerability of lower classed social categories is in North Bihar, India, where floods have been managed through engineering works to create embankments. While the Government appears to be reducing the hazard, this has increased the vulnerability of the local people. Soil fertility has decreased reducing agricultural success, dangerous flash floods are occurring due to embankment walls collapsing and communities have settled on apparently safe embankments and are now highly exposed (Pelling, 2001). The natural flood hazard was dangerous, but these works by society have created a natural disaster (Pelling, 2001). Power inequalities have created this disastrous situation where lower classes are at high exposure to floods due to profit hungry management bodies. This technological approach is clearly failing but the Government and other managing groups make large profits off flood engineering works and have the power to decide how to control the issue (Pelling, 2001). This has resulted in creating

Risk for disasters is a part of life; emergency situations occur more frequently than many people believe. A wise person plans for the worse, and hopes for the best. After a disaster, how well a community can recover will depend largely on how well they prepared in advance. Risk management includes identifying any potential risks to a community and proactively planning to minimize the threat. Proactive organization of resources and people to respond to emergencies can mean the difference between a community’s ability to regroup and recover, and the loss of life. To better