Global Report on Human Settlements 2007 - PoA-ISS

168
Natural and human-made disasters
… cities experience
both large and small
disasters, but the
latter are seldom
systematically
recorded and often
ignored…
Box 7.1 Key terminology
Disasters and their component parts
Disaster: a serious disruption of the functioning of a community
or a society causing widespread human, material, economic or
environmental losses that exceed the ability of the affected
community or society to cope using its own resources. A disaster
is a function of risk processes. It results from a combination of
hazards, human vulnerability and insufficient capacity or measures
to reduce the potential negative consequences of risk.
Natural disaster: a serious disruption to human systems
triggered by a natural hazard causing human, material, economic or
environmental losses that exceed the ability of those affected to
cope.
Human-made disaster: a serious disruption to human systems
triggered by a technological or industrial hazard causing human,
material, economic or environmental losses that exceed the ability
of those affected to cope.
Natural hazards: natural processes or phenomena occurring in
the biosphere that may constitute a damaging event. Natural
hazards can be classified by origin (geophysical or hydrometeorological),
and they can vary in magnitude or intensity,
frequency, duration, area of extent, speed of onset, spatial dispersion
and temporal spacing.
Human-made hazards: danger originating from technological or
industrial accidents, dangerous procedures, infrastructure failures
or certain human activities that may cause the loss of life or injury,
property damage, social and economic disruption, or environmental
degradation. Examples of human-made hazard include industrial
pollution, nuclear activities/accidents and radioactivity, toxic
wastes, dam failures, and industrial or technological accidents
(explosions, fires and spills).
Human vulnerability: the conditions determined by physical,
social, economic and environmental factors or processes that
increase the exposure and susceptibility of people to the impact,
or outcomes, of hazards.
Coping capacity: the means by which people or organizations
use available resources and abilities to face identified adverse
consequences that could lead to a disaster. In general, this involves
managing resources, both in normal times as well as during crises
Source: adapted from ISDR, 2004a
or adverse conditions. The strengthening of coping capacities
builds resilience to withstand the effects of natural and humaninduced
hazards.
Adaptation: adaptation refers to human action taken to reduce
exposure or sensitivity to hazard over the long term.
Managing disaster risk
Disaster risk reduction: an overarching term used to describe
policy aimed at minimizing human vulnerability and disaster risk to
help avoid (prevention) or to limit (mitigation and preparedness)
the adverse impacts of hazards within the broad context of
sustainable development.
Mitigation: structural (e.g. engineering) and non-structural (e.g.
land-use planning) measures undertaken to limit the severity or
frequency of natural and technological phenomena that have the
potential to become hazardous.
Preparedness: activities and measures taken in advance to ensure
effective response to the impact of hazards, including the issuance
of timely and effective early warnings and the temporary evacuation
of people and property from threatened locations.
Response: the provision of assistance or intervention during or
immediately after a disaster to meet the life preservation and basic
subsistence needs of those people affected. It can be of an immediate,
short-term or protracted duration.
Recovery: decisions and actions taken after a disaster with a view
to restoring or improving the pre-disaster living conditions of the
stricken community, while encouraging and facilitating necessary
adjustments to reduce disaster risk. Recovery affords an opportunity
to develop and apply disaster risk reduction through
rehabilitation and reconstruction measures.
Resilience: the capacity of a system, community or society potentially
exposed to hazards to change by coping or adapting in order
to reach and maintain an acceptable level of functioning and structure.
This is determined by the degree to which the social system
is capable of organizing itself to increase its capacity for learning
from past disasters for better future protection and to improve
risk reduction.
addresses the basic needs of survivors. As soon as possible,
and often with some overlap, disaster response is followed
by the more developmental agenda of recovery.
At all stages, from pre-disaster to relief and recovery,
there are opportunities to address the root causes of human
vulnerability, such as (among others) unsafe housing, inadequate
infrastructure, poverty and marginalization. Bringing
these elements of risk reduction together can help to make
individuals, groups and cities more resilient.
THE SCALE OF DISASTERS
Most cities experience both large and small disasters, but the
latter are seldom systematically recorded and are often
ignored, even by the local news media. More often than not,
there is no mention of ‘small disasters’ in the policy statements
of government or non-governmental organizations
(NGOs). 1 Yet, for those involved, small events can be as
destructive as large events causing injury and death and
undermining livelihoods. The impact of small disasters is
particularly worrying because, while there is no systematic
data, many commentators argue that the aggregate impact of
small events in cities exceeds losses to the low-frequency,
high-impact hazards that capture news headlines.
There is no agreed upon definition, such as the scale
of human or economic loss, for what makes a disaster small
or large. In practice, the scale ascribed to a disaster is
context dependent. Ten people being killed by a landslide in