What are Disasters?

2.1 WHAT ARE DISASTERS?

The United Nations International Strategy (2010) describes a disaster as a situation where a particular society finds it absolutely impossible to be self-sufficient in dealing with drastic losses in people, assets, and the environment all caused by severe social dysfunction. That description pictures disasters not as all bushfires, flooding, or pandemic diseases happening since the beginning of human history, but only those capable of causing unbearable losses to specific communities where foreign aid is necessarily demanded. In the light of what the United Nations International Strategy has pictured, Donavan (2013) carries on the description by pointing out that disasters consist of unfamiliar obstacles and the lack of proper tools, labour forces, and local resources of resolution and thereby establish a continually unbridgeable gap between a community and its pre-disaster everyday life. Disasters push the victims into miserable states and strip their most valued things away, ranging from physical subjects like family, friends, memories-filled souvenirs to mental objects as a sense of being safe and secure. This leaves affected residents vulnerable to a number of factors occurring only within life-after-disaster that would include individual to societal scales and from the physical, the community, and the individual dimensions. (Donavan, 2013)

amount of challenges to meet needs }amount of challenges to meet needs

pre - disaster post - disaster

Figure 1. Impacts of disasters on challenges to meet needs. From Thao Nguyen Le, by Thao Nguyen Le, 2021. Copyright 2021 by Thao Nguyen Le.