Community and Emerging Disasters

1
Community and Emerging Disasters

• Philip Buckle
• Coventry Centre for Disaster Management
• p.buckle_at_coventry.ac.uk

2
Current research

• Australia Melbourne, rural Victoria
• UK Boscastle, Lewes, Leonard Stanley
• Central questions
• What new risks do we confront, what precedents do
  we have
• How can we assess impacts and consequences
• What arrangements do we need to deal with these
• Are community responses similar across cultures
  in terms of
• Content
• Process
• Structure

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Disasters

• Disasters typically viewed as
• Rapid onset, episodic
• Reversible and short term
• Natural and outside society
• Managed as extraordinary events
• Not managed as process

4
Disaster Management

• Typically disaster management is characterised
  as
• No long term perspectives on remediation
• No engagement of all sectors and levels of
  society
• No multi-hazard approach
• No cross-boundary engagement

5
New Threats

• Globalisation, Mass transport, Networks and
  interdependencies,
• Climate change
• Agriculture
• Infrastructure
• Transport
• Building design
• Recreation
• Land use
• Rapid disasters e.g. floods, coastal erosion
• Disease
• Infestation

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Changing Risk Landscape

• Localised impacts (e.g. coastal erosion) may be
  managed by accepting losses or innovative
  response e.g surrendering the coast
• Critical infrastructure where everyone is
  affected by damage at a central point
• Wide area emergencies
• Growing (and forced) dependency (e.g. air
  conditioners)

7
Changing Risk Landscape

• New, unpredicted and ambiguous risks with long
  wave, complex consequence chains
• What precedents do we have for rapid social,
  environmental and economic change? Black Death?
  War? Industrial revolution? none ?
• Taking the irreversibility of impacts then what
  changes will result from climate change
• UK drivers of change include 2000 Fuel Crisis,
  FMD, 2001 Flooding (attributed to climate change)

8
Climate related impacts

• New types events
• New areas affected
• More frequent events
• More intense
• E.g. diseases (animal, human, plant), flooding,
  drought, infrastructure, social disruption

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Characteristics of new Threats

• Uncertain and complex
• Emergent issues and thresholds
• Occur at all scales local to global
• May be imperceptible
• Arise from what we do and who we are
• Arise from daily life
• Cause and effect may be hard to link in policy,
  public perception and remediation

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Typical response mechanisms and processes

• Response given priority dealing with the impact
• Recovery usually short term
• Mitigation rarely and not incorporated into
  daily life
• Adaptation unknown

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Required response mechanisms

• To include more fully mitigation, long term
  recovery and adaptation (historical sense)
• A sense of daily life, who we are and what we do
• A sense of purposefulness in DM planning
• To include adaptation as a DM strategy
• Adaptation
• Long term
• Irreversible
• Planned
• Inclusive
• Consensual

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Changes

• Redefinition of what we mean by disaster to
  include long wave events/processes, structural
  change and phenomena to which we are not (or are
  no longer) adapted and events that emerge from
  what we do and who we are and inclusion of local
  engagement in the process of redefinition
• Better understanding of risk, risk perception and
  risk acceptability
• Linking recovery and mitigation to adaptation
• Linking all the players in the game

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Changes

• Policy re-interpretation of risk and disaster
• Organisational removal of silos, engagement of
  NGO sector, agility, challenging uniformed
  services
• Financial support for mitigation and planned
  change
• Cultural/Social education and awareness, and a
  dialogue between community and government
• Cultural political acceptance of uncertainty,
  complexity and poor information, and
  acknowledgement of choice and values