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Essay on Natural Disaster, Comparing Huadong and Spence Views.

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GO125 Natural Disasters
April 4th, 2012
Homework 1 Essay For the purpose of this paper I chose to summarize two articles from the given selection. I have chosen to read an article by Robin Spence titled “Risk and regulation: can improved government action reduce the impacts of natural disasters?”, and another by Huadong Guo titled “Understanding global natural disasters and the role of earth observation”.
ARTICLE 1 “Natural disasters have become major threats to human life and the world economy,
Governments and international organizations are cooperating to promote global and regional risk management, and to improve the capability to mitigate the effects of disasters.(Guo, 2011)” Huadong Guo wrote his article based on the …show more content…

Develop a regulation towards assessment and strengthening or modifying existing buildings that are now known to constitute a potential danger 3. And to look at ways in which regulations for the provision and control of natural hazards insurance is being mitigation.
The article written by Robin Spence starts out explaining how the risk of natural hazards has highly increased over the last century. Richer countries have developed ways to decrease the loss of life from earthquake situations and also made “modest” progress in reducing casualties in storm and flood related events. Poor countries have seem to make progress as well in combating the loss of life due to earthquakes however they have not been as fortunate combating the loss of life in storms and other hazardous situations. The article asks “Why, when scientific understanding of the causes of these events is increasing rapidly and engineering skill to design against them is so highly developed, do these large death tolls continue and the financial losses continue to mount? And what should nations, cities, employees, families, for example, be doing about it? (Spence, 2011)”
Building codes and regulations today exist almost everywhere and are almost universal from one location to the next. It has been proven that through the use of regulation and codes that there has been much success in preventing and limiting damage in extreme events. “The first design code for new buildings, with an

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