Disaster Management

Disaster Management courses

Bournemouth University Disaster Management Centre (BUDMC) has an international reputation for excellence in the provision of disaster management education, training and technical assistance, and we are proud of the practical nature of the research, training and consultancy we deliver.

We have been delivering education in this specialised field for twenty years, and our staff have decades of experience in education, research and practice. We work with governments, international aid agencies and multi-national businesses.

Preparing for and managing disasters is an extremely high-pressured environment. Drawing upon the experience of national governments around the world, we foster global best practice and develop cohesion between government departments, emergency services, the military, tourism, aid agencies and more. As well as our postgraduate degree, BU’s Disaster Management Centre also delivers bespoke training and consultancy for organisations and governments around the world, helping them build resilience as well as establishing protocols for handling a wide variety of disaster management scenarios. BUDMC conducts internationally recognised innovative research, contributing fresh ideas and critical findings to crisis and disaster management across the world. That means we can draw on real-world experience and real-life scenarios to help develop your learning, providing an unparalleled insight into preparing for, and managing through, crises and disasters.

Our students leave our courses confident that they can participate in the writing of crisis and disaster management plans, or in reviewing and improving the plans of others.

Richard Gordon, Director, BU Disaster Management Centre

MSc Disaster Management 116

Case study: Tackling Covid-19

When the spread of Covid-19 changed the world as we knew it in early 2020, BUDMC played a key part in the response, supporting a number of countries around the world.

The team worked particularly closely with the government of Sierra Leone, having established a strong relationship when advising them on managing the national response to the 2014 Ebola outbreak in the country.

Building capacity

A BUDMC team is working with the Department of Disaster Management in the Office of National Security (ONS) and Freetown City Council (FCC) in the AFRICAB (Driving African Capacity Building in Disaster Management) project. Funded by the UK’s Global Challenges Research Fund (GCRF), BUDMC is helping Sierra Leone’s districts to handle both Covid-19 and the challenges of the rainy season. In particular, the BUDMC – through AFRICAB – is co-producing key publications focused on practically helping the districts of Sierra Leone country-wide, building capacity on the ground and identifying and solving single points of failure.

Freetown, Sierra Leone

Wider implications

The work could have wider implications for the entire continent too. Many African nations could experience added complications in their Covid-19 response planning, as a change in the weather could bring natural disaster events such as flooding and monsoons, which could further hamper their efforts to curb the spread of the virus.

Saving lives

BU's Professor Lee Miles, who leads the BUDMC team, explains further: "We are really seeking to help them build resilience around handling combined scenarios that pose real challenges. For example, the capital, Freetown, floods almost every year. The standard response is to move people impacted by the flooding to the safety of a large stadium, or a hall or school. However, placing people out of harm's way in large, robust locations poses new challenges for containing Covid-19. "We're helping them think through how they plan for these challenging combinations of eventualities, and supporting them in making decisions that may save lives both now and in the future."

MSc

Disaster Management

Key Information Duration & delivery:

1 year full-time, 2 years parttime. Each unit is delivered via 1 week of intensive lectures/seminars followed by 8 weeks online learning

Start date: September

Tuition fees:

UK/RoI: £9,690 Overseas: £15,300

Entry requirements:

A Bachelor's Honours degree with 2:2 in any subject, or equivalent

Required subjects:

None

If English is not your first language:

IELTS 6.5 (Academic) with a minimum of 6.5 in writing and 6.0 in all other components, or equivalent

Bournemouth University International College:

Have you considered Pre-Sessional English or a Pre-Master’s to help meet your entry requirements? To find out more, visit

www.bournemouth.ac.uk/ international-college

Why choose this course?

In a post-COVID 19 world, the MSc Disaster Management is an essential qualification for anyone wanting to enter the world of disaster, crisis and emergency management. Bournemouth University Disaster Management Centre is one of the world’s leading providers of disaster management training, education and research. This course draws upon a wide spectrum of current practitioner disciplines, groundbreaking research agendas and current case studies in disaster management. You will have the opportunity to learn about natural and man-made disasters, the importance of public health emergencies and business continuity when disasters strike, and engage with experts from other relevant areas such as the role of foreign policy in crisis management and the importance of humanitarian operations and external assistance.

Course overview

Our aim is to develop the knowledge and skills required for existing and future crisis and disaster management leaders from a broad range of organisations. Our students typically include government agencies, national and international industries, emergency services and public health medical services, the military, wider academia, small to mediumsized enterprises, faith-based and local community organisations and those involved in public information and the media. Our aim is to develop future leaders who see disaster management as a multi-disciplinary activity drawing upon hard and soft science in support of practitioner-based approaches that lead to cohesive strategies, which are underpinned by academic rigour and practical experience.

In a world in which both public and private sectors are increasingly aware of the risks to their reputation and business survival when disaster strikes, your studies will prepare you to be able to promote disaster management planning within wider security and sustainable development strategies in such a way that they are fully integrated, practised and exercised.

After years of struggling to get my dream job in intelligence, this course has opened up the doors I needed and I am now an intelligence analyst! I was even employed in my new job before I had completed my degree! The broad nature of the course has opened up my prospects ten-fold and allowed me to obtain crucial contacts with industry leaders.

Jamie Simpson, graduate

Developing Policies & Plans: You will be introduced to the importance of sound disaster management plans and frameworks. Internationally, many nations still do not have developed disaster management plans, and this unit has been developed over several years and in multiple countries to assist national governments and their agencies to address this vital issue. The principles of this unit underpin each of the subsequent units.

Management of Communications & Learning:

This unit teaches you how to communicate learning in effective and attractive ways: gaining the interest of audiences, drawing upon audience experience and knowledge, winning audience cooperation for greater integrated activities, and creating relevant participatory simulation exercises from academic and practical-based literature to help turn lessons identified into lessons learned.

Dissertation: An opportunity to research and study a subject in depth, showing your understanding of it. The dissertation is the conclusion of your learning experience, where you’ll carry out a research project. You’ll use appropriate research methodology to collect and analyse data and present your findings. Your dissertation will be 15,000 words, and you’ll be taught about research methods.

Option units (choose four)

Management of Man-Made Disasters & Security

Threats: This unit focuses on the nature and types of man-made (human instigated) hazards, including those on land, air and sea alongside such issues as crowd safety and industrial accidents. Taking a case study approach, you will evaluate the lessons learned from recent reports and complete a strategic level multihazard planning and response exercise as part of a group.

Management of Natural Hazards: You will examine the complexities of natural hazards which could affect your country. You will learn to evaluate the management issues associated with such hazards (for example early warning systems), and how these can be applied to major incident management, risk reduction and recovery and national planning.

Management of Wider Stakeholders: You will develop an understanding of the unique needs and critical resources of a range of business sectors and their key stakeholders and will consider the management issues associated with integrating these into a national disaster management framework including risk reduction, response and recovery. This unit uses the travel and tourism industries as a launch point for study but also includes critical national infrastructure and the energy industries.

Humanitarian Operations and External

Assistance: This unit introduces you to the challenges that arise when external assistance is offered to another country. You will discuss the differences between humanitarian operations or assistance and humanitarian intervention. Using a developing set of scenarios, you will engage in simulation exercises as a deployed team offering external assistance to a country faced with a number of natural hazards. The unit concludes by then applying those lessons identified to the home national plan.

Public Health Preparedness, Resilience

& Response: Throughout this unit, you will examine public health resilience and response strategies within the context of disaster management. Looking at current national and international best practice drawn from a combination of academic and professional practitioner approaches to healthcare resilience, you will learn methods for establishing effective healthcare emergency preparedness, resilience and response systems.

Foreign Policy Analysis & Crisis Management:

You will focus on understanding the concepts and practice of foreign policy analysis relevant to disaster management. You’ll consider the diplomatic dimensions of international disaster and crisis management and evaluate key challenges shaping foreign policy in relation to crises and disasters.

Disaster Management for Business

Professionals: You will gain a detailed appreciation of the concepts, theories, challenges and practices of the private sector when preparing for, responding to, and recovering from crises and disasters.