Understanding Risk • 16
Understanding Disasters and Disaster Risk Disaster Risk Reduction is a very powerful concept, which not only aims to prevent new disaster risk, but to reduce existing disaster risk to strengthen resilience. Just think about that for a minute: Disaster Risk Reduction helps you prepare for the worst, so that you have the best chance of coming out the other side of disasters. Not only does it help you reduce the impact of disasters, it helps reduce the likelihood of them happening in the first place. It is entirely possible to be prepared for disasters, as the Case Studies section demonstrates.
But, before we go further, let’s get some other terminology clear. What do we mean by disasters, risk, vulnerability and resilience? Disaster: “A serious disruption of the functioning of a community or a society at any scale due to hazardous events interacting with conditions of exposure, vulnerability and capacity, leading to one or more of the following: human, material, economic and environmental losses and impacts.” Although it is easy to think of disasters as short-term, major incidents, disasters can also be long-lasting, chronic situations. A flood or a fire would normally constitute a short-lived disaster, while the steady worsening of the environment, or climate change, are also major disasters in themselves, leading to many local impacts. Whether a localized, one-off event, or a more systematic problem, the same approaches can be used to identify risks, and manage and prevent them.
