Importance of Disaster Preparedness - Case Study Example

During the last three decades, the world has been confronted by an unprecedented increase of the frequency and magnitude of extreme natural events such as earthquakes, floods, forest fires and droughts. Despite the efforts to alleviate the impact of environmental disasters, potential losses in terms of human, economic and other intangible losses are still inevitably increasing. What makes matters worse is that the twenty-first century has been experiencing an uneven explosion in the world’s population growth and an exponential growth in the size and number of towns and cities across the world. As the urban areas increase in size, the likelihood of occurrence of damage and a level of exposure in buildings and infrastructure increase. Such that even the occurrence of a low intensity event often results in devastating damages up to the national level, especially when they occur close to urban centres. Thus it is understood that beyond the magnitude of their impact, it is the inability of the system to respond appropriately which complicates the problem. The issues faced while undertaking relief and rescue operations for the aforementioned situations owing to regional bottlenecks are the other set of factors that need to be understood for better disaster preparedness. One answer might be techniques like Vulnerability and Capacity Analysis (VCA). The VCA is used for identification and quantification of vulnerability, while also measuring the regional capabilities. As a result of the VCA, the programme has been widely accepted to ensure that risks to vulnerable people are reduced. However, despite of its growing use, it is still not factored systematically into development project planning processes resulting a feeling of ambiguousness toward the system and limitation of its use. In this paper, the main conceptual and practical challenges in carrying out Vulnerabilities and Capacities Assessment and Analysis (VCA) are identified and corresponding solutions are suggested to overcome those challenges. Figure 1. Project planning cycle in VCA (modified from IFRC, VCA toolbox with reference sheet1) Among the various methods often adopted for undertaking the VCA process, the participatory methods have had considerable success when compared to other means of identifying the exact factors involved in most issues. Figure 1 shows a range of participatory research methods that involve the mixture of well-known social science methods and other visualized methods. When disaster strikes a region, the impact of these events is borne by the entire population and hence, the vulnerability within entire cross section of the country needs to be mapped within depth to understand the magnitude of effect. Figure 2 Tools for assessing socio-economic vulnerability (Source: ProVention Guidance Notes 20072) Another factor is the perception of people towards these events, which could be frequent. The attitude of peoples’ impacted by disastrous events would help the policy makers and support agencies to prioritize the action process. Even in the cases considered though the common problems perceived in the developing regions were water shortage. The local community in these countries not only have different perceptions on the risks, but also anticipates different type of problems they might have to face due to the natural disaster or crisis. Further, variation in the type of demographic profile and socio-political conditions might make all bureaucratic approaches to identify the priority programme ineffective. Hence, it is crucial to clarify the different aspirations from various institutions to attain the ideal goals that can be achieved in limited time. The following report is an example of successful findings using a focus group discussion from one Palestine VCA. Case study from Palestine VCA3 An interesting observation within this study was the ‘gap’ between the ideas generated from the communities and the Ministry/Institutions that can serve as useful baselines from which develop the national plan. Of unique value, the information from the children/youth group provides such a planning group with rich and interesting ideas. The impacts of the study on all concerned has facilitated enlightenment about each other’s functions and shared hitherto unrecognised possibilities for all in developing future plans. This is powerful because it is likely that the eventual national plan will now allow this ‘new view of reality’ to modify and integrate individual emergency plans which might previously have not considered important needs of the communities we serve. This VCA study has facilitated process of thinking as a philosophy for disaster preparedness in the PRCS. Importantly, it has empowered PRCS employees to become dynamic action researchers, where partners and community have become united in Participatory Learning and Action for the future. This group discussion provided much needed input on the VCA process. It also provides insight on how the community thinks about particular possible situations. There are problems with the VCA. Two fundamental problems in a VCA are restrained time and resources. Participatory methods like focus group discussions and community meetings can overcome time and resource constraints effectively by compromising the gaps between communities and the institutions. It is important to realize that there are many unforeseen hazards which are difficult to be determined by outsiders without intensive discussion and understanding of the society involved. Although many VCA methods have been developed throughout different research groups4, academia, disaster management agencies, the climate change community and development agencies for various purposes, existing frameworks does not factored systematically into development project planning processes due to distinct and unique nature of the project. Each community and possible disaster is unique to each diverse region. This causes problems in creating a universal VCA system. Each VCA system must be developed for the unique region it will be used for. Figure 3 BBC model incorporating exposure and coping capacity into vulnerability (Adapted from Birkmann, 20055) The BBC conceptual framework shows that it is also important to assess potential intervention system to reduce social, environmental, economic sphere of vulnerability. This framework primarily focuses on environments. However, there is a weakness of this framework that does not consider any physical dimension on vulnerability such as buildings and infrastructures. It means this framework is inadequate for other disasters like earthquake. Thus, it is vital to use the right tools and frameworks with some caution to suit for right purpose of VCA. Unclear terms or different meanings for the same terms used for many studies have widened the gaps between the research groups and professionals resulting additional complexity in their compatible use. In order to cope with many faces of vulnerability, generally accepted flexible framework needs to be developed which defines specific means to every particular word used but it is also important to understand the dynamic and creative characteristics in VCA. Now, more challenges on different types of vulnerability are investigated further. Many dimensions on vulnerability often complicate the practitioners while carrying out VCA. Twigg6 and many other academic researchers mentioned the list of existing dimensions on vulnerability as social, economic, physical, environmental, demographical, political, cultural and psychological that spans many sectors. It is not only many faces of vulnerability that causes obscurity of its use, but also the holistic view from intrinsic to extrinsic. Social vulnerability is one dimension of vulnerability that involves complex interactions among social, institutions, politic and cultural systems. They are often immeasurable and unquantifiable dimensions that many existing assessments often have not warranted much attention in understanding the depth within the vulnerability of society. The cases of the Roma or Gipsy have often categorized these groups as vulnerable in Europe and Central Asia. The Roma population is estimated at 7 to 9 million and often do not rank them as an important ethnic minority7. However, there is interesting findings from the Roma’s disaster response in Athens VCA. The most of Roma live in vans as a type of their settlement. In the case of severe earthquakes, their first reaction is to drive towards the origin of earthquake so that they can claim for compensation from the government by outwitting law. Their high mobility and easy accessibility increased their capacities in coping disasters. This is clearly unexpected evidence of coping strategies of the Roma showing complex social system that are linked with political system. Further feasible study on the Roma communities should be carried out in order to provide appropriate remediation to the one of largest minority in Europe. In general, rich people are less vulnerable to disasters than the poor. In many cases, this statement is certainly true because rich people have more resources to improve their situations. However, this is not always true to particular disasters as shown at the case of Cameroon in 19868. Although the area was a long settled rich agricultural area, 1700 people were killed in their sleep due to carbon dioxide. There were no social differences in its impacts and both rich and poor suffered equally. There is a considerable overlap between social and economic vulnerability. In most of a post-disaster stage, poverty and unemployment rate takes a sudden turn for the worse at a time of stress. Although economic vulnerability cannot be directly read off from poverty, it may be the quickest way to determine the social dimension from socio-economic vulnerability. Income rate is often reflected in measuring people’s standards of living such as poverty. However, Andrew Leicester et al9 suggested that expenditure may be the better measure of poverty since the income can be very unstable both in short and long term depending on employment status or seasonal variation. Expenditure may therefore capture a better picture of living than current income. Furthermore, the World Bank10 suggests a set of indicators that can be used to measure poverty; Incidence of poverty (headcount index), Depth of poverty (poverty gap), Poverty severity (squared poverty gap). None the less, measuring poverty conducts a series of issues due to the choice of instruments, measurement errors and sampling issues and therefore, it is undesirable to use dataset unless the author clearly specifies the source and the method. In relation to determining the poverty level, potential recovery periods will be also useful in estimating economic and institutional capacity. The longer recovery periods may increase set back in economic growth and cripple local and national economies as well wiping out years of economic gains made prior to the event through poverty reduction programs11. The major cause of this is the lack of sufficient capital from institutions following an event to pay for the short terms needs as well as long term recovery. The following case study on national insurance policy earthquake in Turkey shows the positive example of alternative recommendation on how institutions can overcome such problems. There is a government-sponsored World Bank project12, Turkish Catastrophic Insurance Pool (TCIP), which was created in 2000 with the essential aim of transferring the government’s financial burden of replacing earthquake-damage. This is a compulsory earthquake insurance system for homeowners at affordable price. Although there are still many challenges to be improved, it has significant benefit of improvement of risk culture and insurance consciousness in public. Despite the fact that determining capacity is an essential element in understanding and reducing vulnerability, VCA often fail to pay enough attention to the capacity dimension of VCA. For example, the number of the hospitals is determined in physical capacity sector. However, the number of resilient buildings or infrastructures is not good enough to explain physical capacity of the society. The policy of the equal rights in treatment and the quality of service make significant difference. This shows the evidence of interaction between physical and political dimension of vulnerability. Furthermore, the structural vulnerability in resilient buildings needs to be determined. If the resilient buildings are not strong enough in case of severe disasters, then it makes the society more vulnerable. Strong buildings and safe buildings are not only thing to be considered, particularly when the level of disaster preparedness remains low. Human behaviour is not as predictive as a structure. Hence, psychological variables in protective behaviours like optimistic bias, normalization bias, and cultural worldview need to be observed in order to understand public perception. In many countries, people’s common perception towards the natural disaster is often found to be low due to critical awareness (just not talking about it), optimistic bias and fatalism. According to the findings from Turkey13, people have lack of trust in engineers and institutions like government presume that they are not helpful at all. People thinks retrofitting or other intervention methods are not effective than rebuilding. What they do is either nothing or waiting until government provide the new safe houses without realizing that they have no intention to prepare nor intention to seek information. These problems are general more complicated than providing the community with the better education on disaster. To recover, the lack of trust between public and institutions, political and legal backups with long term supports will be needed as well the local ownership and empowerment. Wisner et al14 introduced two antithetic concepts in relation to psychological aspect of people’s risk taking perception. The case of living in hazardous environment by some rich people for the view is a voluntary choice. On the contrary, the poor in Brazil or Philippine have involuntary choice of living where bounded rationality applies. To explain better on psychological aspects on human risk taking behaviour, it will be helpful to make use of effective disaster preparedness model. Figure 4 The Disaster Preparedness Model (adapted from Paton et al15, 2005) These risk perception is an important precursor for mitigation and preparedness that can influence significantly in assessing vulnerability and capacity analysis. To understand and assess human vulnerability and capacity, the factors including preparedness, available recourses and potential recovery time should be taken account within the VCA. Typical problems can occur in data gathering process. Assume that many data might be available from the primary sources or secondary sources. When there is large volume of available data, often the reliability and validity of information is not examined. In addition, it is very important to carry out the desk study in depth and fully understood to produce the questionnaires to cover all potentially influential factors. In case of Athens VCA, the design of questionnaire ran parallel with the desk study to work more efficiently and to manage the time well. However, the main problem that could face in designing questionnaire without enough desk study is the limitation of choices in questionnaire. These are often caused by inappropriate assumptions made. This might cause significant errors in analysing data or lead to the wrong conclusions. After checking the reliability of data collected, it needs to be triangulated together from different sources of data. From the experience of Athens VCA, triangulation may be more efficient to be done by one person rather than the group of people because various interpretations from many analysers may cause a lot of confusions and time consumption. From the experience of Athens VCA, triangulation may be more efficient to be done by one person rather than the group of people because various interpretations from many analysers may cause a lot of confusion and time consumption. Read More