IPCC_Managing Risks of Extreme Events.pdf - Climate Access

Chapter 1Climate Change: New Dimensions in Disaster Risk, Exposure, Vulnerability, and ResilienceDisasterCLIMATEVulnerabilityDEVELOPMENTNaturalVariabilityAnthropogenicClimate ChangeWeather andClimateEventsDISASTERRISKDisaster RiskManagementClimate ChangeAdaptationExposureGreenhouse Gas EmissionsFigure 1-1 | The key concepts and scope of this report. The figure indicates schematically key concepts involved in disaster risk management and climate change adaptation, andthe interaction of these with sustainable development.Disasters are defined in this report as severe alterations in the normalfunctioning of a community or a society due to hazardous physical eventsinteracting with vulnerable social conditions, leading to widespreadadverse human, material, economic, or environmental effects thatrequire immediate emergency response to satisfy critical human needsand that may require external support for recovery.The hazardous physical events referred to in the definition of disastermay be of natural, socio-natural (originating in the human degradationor transformation of the physical environment), or purely anthropogenicorigins (see Lavell, 1996, 1999; Smith, 1996; Tobin and Montz, 1997;Wisner et al., 2004). This Special Report emphasizes hydrometeorologicaland oceanographic events; a subset of a broader spectrum of physicalevents that may acquire the characteristic of a hazard if conditions ofexposure and vulnerability convert them into a threat. These includeearthquakes, volcanoes, and tsunamis, among others. Any one geographicarea may be affected by one, or a combination of, such events at thesame or different times. Both in this report and in the wider literature,some events (e.g., floods and droughts) are at times referred to asphysical impacts (see Section 3.1.1).Extreme events are often but not always associated with disaster. Thisassociation will depend on the particular physical, geographic, and socialconditions that prevail (see this section and Chapter 2 for discussion ofthe conditioning circumstances associated with so-called ‘exposure’and ‘vulnerability’) (Ball, 1975; O’Keefe et al., 1976; Timmerman, 1981;Hewitt, 1983; Maskrey, 1989; Mileti, 1999; Wisner et al., 2004).Non-extreme physical events also can and do lead to disasters wherephysical or societal conditions foster such a result. In fact, a significantnumber of disasters registered annually in most disaster databasesare associated with physical events that are not extreme as definedprobabilistically, yet have important social and economic impacts onlocal communities and governments, both individually and in aggregate(UNISDR, 2009e, 2011) (high confidence).For example, many of the ‘disasters’ registered in the widely consultedUniversity of Louvaine EM-DAT database (CRED, 2010) are not initiatedby statistically extreme events, but rather exhibit extreme propertiesexpressed as severe interruptions in the functioning of local social andeconomic systems. This lack of connection is even more obvious in theDesInventar database (Corporación OSSO, 2010), developed first inLatin America in order to specifically register the occurrence of smallandmedium-scale disasters, and which has registered tens and tens ofthousands of these during the last 30 years in the 29 countries it coversto date. This database has been used by the UNISDR, the Inter-AmericanDevelopment Bank, and others to examine disaster occurrence, scale,and impacts in Latin America and Asia, in particular (Cardona 2005,2008; IDEA, 2005; UNISDR, 2009e, 2011; ERN-AL, 2011). In any oneplace, the range of disaster-inducing events can increase if socialconditions deteriorate (Wisner et al., 2004, 2011).The occurrence of disaster is always preceded by the existence ofspecific physical and social conditions that are generally referred toas disaster risk (Hewitt, 1983; Lewis, 1999, 2009; Bankoff, 2001;31