Delivered by Professor Talbot Brooks, Director of the Center for Interdisciplinary Geospatial Information Technologies at Delta State University, the UN-SPIDER Regional Support Office in the United States of America, this webinar addresses the following items:
Understanding the relationship between disaster, environment and social vulnerability
When a hazard event (such as a drought, flood, cyclone, earthquake or tsunami) occurs, triggering a loss of life and damage to infrastructure, it highlights the reality that society and its assets are vulnerable to such events. When discussing disaster risk management, a disaster can highlight the following in a community:
The State of El Salvador has established in 2011 the Secretariat for Vulnerability Issues of the Presidency of El Salvador (SAV) with the mandate to implement actions necessary to prevent and eradicate vulnerability that the country faces with regards to natural and human-caused phenomena.
SAV's mission is to manage and coordinate with the institutions of the National System for Civil Protection, Disaster Prevention and Disaster Mitigation. Among its tasks are:
Flood is one of the most common geohazards, which also costs most devastation to society. There are areas more vulnerable to floods, where measures are taken to mitigate the impacts, but further research is needed for identifying flood vulnerability in order to make communities in such vulnerable areas more resilient.
Professor Alberto Montanari from the University of Bologna found new ways of pinpointing vulnerable areas by using satellite observation of night time lights from homes or businesses and combining this data with river network data.
The newly created Southern California Earthquake Center has build up a data base of the region’s seismographic nature in hope to prevent devastating events like in the 1989 San Francisco 6.7 Magnitude Earthquake through better risk assessment.
Earthquakes cannot be predicted, but better knowledge about the faults, motion and ruptures can be useful to make an estimation of future seismic events and so support the infrastructure works – better buildings assessment and more efficient response.
In November 2013 Germanwatch published the 9th edition of the Global Climate Risk Index for which the most recent data available —from 1993 to 2012— were taken into account. The Global Climate Risk Index 2014 analyses to what extent the impacts of weather-related loss events have affected countries around the globe.
This is event is available for participation on an ongoing basis
English
Overview
This course helps in strengthening of the capacity of individuals to reduce the impact of disasters through enhancing their knowledge and skills to promote and adopt disaster reduction practices as an integral part of the development process at community, national, sub-regional and regional levels. It provides a range of learning opportunities to disaster managers who wish to include knowledge of disaster management in their on-going professional development.
UN-SPIDER's Regional Support Office CATHALAC – The Water Center for the Humid Tropics of Latin America and the Caribbean –, elaborated a profile of the relative vulnerability of Central America's Caribbean and Pacific coasts to the hazards of storm-induced coastal erosion and storm surge. The analysis included the seven Central American countries (i.e. Belize, Guatemala, El Salvador, Honduras, Nicaragua, Costa Rica, and Panama) and was done to provide a reference level for decision-making regarding coastal planning.
The Asian Development Bank in its study "Intense Climate Disasters and Development in Asia-Pacific" stresses the great risk that Asian countries face in the context of climate related disasters. The frequency of intense floods and storms is increasing globally, particularly in Asia-Pacific, amid the specter of climate change. Associated with these natural disasters are more variable and extreme rainfall and temperatures as recorded in publicly available databases for the world, Asia-Pacific, and the Philippines, the case examined in detail.
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