Challenges Associated with Creeping Disasters in Disaster Risk Science and Practice: Considering Disaster Onset Dynamics

In this article, we set out to reconcile a general conceptualization of disaster temporalities by drawing on the epitome example of a creeping disaster, namely famine. Our argument is driven by the recognition that slowly manifesting disaster impacts pose distinct challenges for decision makers and researchers while there is a tendency for the disaster literature to overlook the role of disaster onset dynamics. More specifically and as a starting point, we identify four key themes that merit particular attention when dealing with creeping disasters: (1) our understanding of disaster as a phenomenon; (2) measurement and operationalization; (3) early warning and response; and (4) disaster management and termination. By integrating conceptual discussions of disaster with famine scholarship—a phenomenon often excluded from mainstream disaster research—this article provides fresh perspectives on disaster science as well as a number of implications for how we think about disaster risk reduction.

Detecting Natural Hazard-Related Disaster Impacts with Social Media Analytics: The Case of Australian States and Territories

Natural hazard-related disasters are disruptive events with significant impact on people, communities, buildings, infrastructure, animals, agriculture, and environmental assets. The exponentially increasing anthropogenic activities on the planet have aggregated the climate change and consequently increased the frequency and severity of these natural hazard-related disasters, and consequential damages in cities. The digital technological advancements, such as monitoring systems based on fusion of sensors and machine learning, in early detection, warning and disaster response systems are being implemented as part of the disaster management practice in many countries and presented useful results. Along with these promising technologies, crowdsourced social media disaster big data analytics has also started to be utilized. This study aims to form an understanding of how social media analytics can be utilized to assist government authorities in estimating the damages linked to natural hazard-related disaster impacts on urban centers in the age of climate change. To this end, this study analyzes crowdsourced disaster big data from Twitter users in the testbed case study of Australian states and territories. The methodological approach of this study employs the social media analytics method and conducts sentiment and content analyses of location-based Twitter messages (n = 131,673) from Australia. The study informs authorities on an innovative way to analyze the geographic distribution, occurrence frequency of various disasters and their damages based on the geo-tweets analysis.

SIR Modeling the Dual Disaster Impacts of Omicron B.1.1.529 and Natural Disaster Events on Simulated 6 Months (December 2021 – May 2022) Healthcare System Resiliences in Fragile SE Asia Ring of Fire Ecosystems

For some countries that have experienced numerous natural disasters, including massive earthquakes and tsunamis, managing the COVID-19 pandemic can be very challenging. This situation arises considering that the disaster can directly and indirectly affect the healthcare system’ s capacity to serve the COVID-19 cases. With severely damaged healthcare facilities due to the disaster, there will be severely ill COVID-19 cases unmanaged. The coupling and interplay between these two phenomena can indeed be catastrophic. One of the regions where this issue becomes concerned is in Southeast Asia, where most of the Asian countries lie in the fragile ring of fire ecosystem, contributing to the high tsunami and earthquake disasters in the world. At the same time, Asia is one of the regions that have been severely impacted due to the current COVID-19 Delta Variant. Recently, a more contagious Omicron Variant has emerged and put a more massive burden on the healthcare facilities that are impacted by disasters. Then, in this situation, this paper aims to assess healthcare resilience in managing the Omicron pandemic amid disaster impacts. SIR simulation was used to determine whether severely ill Omicron cases were below or above healthcare and ICU capacity under different vaccination coverage. Our result confirms that vaccination coverage was the imminent factor in reducing the severely ill cases in every healthcare facility, whether the facilities were damaged or not. Increasing vaccination coverage from 30% to 60% will significantly reduce the number of severely ill cases that fall below the capacity of healthcare. Based on the current SIR model on the Omicron epidemic variables and Ro, it is estimated that the Omicron will reach its peak after 180 days in February 2022 and will totally disappear in May 2022 in this modeled area. When healthcare system facilities were fully operational and no disaster happened, combined with 60% vaccination rates, all Omicron case numbers were below and under the available hospital beds and even available ICU beds. While the situation is changed when a disaster occurs and causes 30% damage or reduction to healthcare facilities. In this situation, there are portions of Omicron cases that cannot be managed by the healthcare system since the cases have exceeded the available beds. The situations become more apparent where the healthcare facilities are severely damaged and lose 60% of their functionality. In this situation, all modeled Omicron cases and even the severe cases have exceeded the ICU capacity.

Flash flood impacts on the life and livelihood of women at haor areas in Bangladesh

Flash flood is a common disaster in northeastern haor areas of Bangladesh. It frequently affects the life and livelihood of haor people every year. Women are the most vulnerable in this catastrophic situation compared to men. The present study attempted to explore the effects of flash floods on women at Tahirpur Upazila in the Sunamganj district. A semi-structured questionnaire survey on 172 married women chosen from four villages, seven focus group interviews, and ten key informant interviews was conducted for primary data collection. A Flash Flood Impact Ranking (FFIR) was also prepared to grade the impacts on women based on a 3-points weighted severity scale. The study findings revealed that women suffered from different diseases with physical injuries and faced many difficulties managing the shelter, food, safe water, sanitation, and fuel for cooking during the flood. The FFIR displayed that crops damage, lack of funds, job opportunities, sanitation problems, and food insecurities were the top five disaster impacts on women. It is suggested that Government and other agencies should increase women's coping strategies by ensuring health services and employment opportunities to mitigate damage and flash flood-related problems.

Detection and attribution of the spatiotemporal trend of climatic disaster impacts and vulnerability in Nepal

The impacts of climatic disasters have been rising globally. Several studies argue that this upward trend is due to rapid growth in the population and wealth exposed to disasters. Others argue that rising extreme weather events due to anthropogenic climate change are responsible for the increase. Hence, the causes of the increase in disaster impacts remain elusive. Disaster impacts are higher in low-income countries, but existing studies are mostly from developed countries or at the cross-country level. Here we assess the spatiotemporal trends of climatic disaster impacts and vulnerability and their attribution to climatic and socioeconomic factors at the subnational scale in a low-income country, using Nepal as a case study. Loss of life is the most extreme consequence of disasters. Therefore, we employed human mortality as a measure of disaster impacts, and mortality normalized by exposed population as a measure of human vulnerability. We found that climatic disaster frequency and mortality increased in Nepal from 1991 to 2020. However, vulnerability decreased, most likely due to economic growth and progress in disaster risk reduction and climate change adaptation. Disaster mortality is positively correlated with disaster frequency and negatively correlated with per capita income but is not correlated with exposed population. Hence, population growth may not have caused the rise in disaster mortality in Nepal. The strong rise in disaster incidence, potentially due to climate change, has overcome the effect of decreasing vulnerability and caused the rise in disaster mortality.

Climate Change, Flood Disaster Risk and Food Security Nexus in Northern Ghana

This research reviews climate change, flood disasters impacts and food security nexus in northern Ghana. The impacts of climate change include flood disasters which in turn affect food production with subsequent impact on food security. While climate change impact can be positive in some regions, it can be negative in other regions as it could lead to excess or lack of water, which negatively affects food production. Most especially, flood disasters have reportedly become frequent with devastating consequences on food production. Literature further suggests that the frequency of floods and their impacts have the potential to increase in the future. Floods inundate farms, pastures and livestock, which could subsequently reduce crop yields and animal production. Floods also destroys physical infrastructure and disrupts socio-economic activities which are linked to agriculture sector and could affect food production. This eventually decreases food availability, accessibility, utilization, and stability in the region. Northern Ghana has experienced flood disasters with increased frequency, which are related to climate change impacts. Although there is research on climate change, flood disasters, and food security issues in northern Ghana, the literature thus far indicates no clear focus of studies that focuses on the nexus of climate change, flood disasters, and food security of the study site. Thus, this research seeks to review the nexus of climate change, and flood disaster impacts on food security in northern Ghana with their implications on food security in the region. This study has two main research objectives. The first objective of this research is to identify and understand the potential impacts of climate change and flood disasters on food production in the study site. The second research objective is to explain the connection between climate change and flood disasters and the implications of this relationship on food security in the study site. This review study focuses on climate change, flood disasters, and food production to understand the critical impacts of climate change and flood disasters on food security in the northern part of Ghana. The aim of this research is to contribute to literature and discussion of the nexus of climate change, flood disaster impacts and food security sub-Saharan Africa.

Translating Risk Information to Protective Action

Natural hazards have been a part of the landscape since its existence, but they are becoming more devastating as they intersect with growing populations and as climate change increases their frequency and intensity. As these changes occur, the need to understand how to reduce disaster impacts becomes paramount. Despite growing concern and increasing costs of disasters over the past decade, household preparedness, which is at the foundation of disaster readiness, has seen little to no improvement. Using two research experiments, we adopt the Protective Action Decision Model (PADM; Lindell & Perry, 2004; 2012) as a framework to investigate what motivates households to prepare and examine how effective risk communication strategies are at increasing awareness and preparedness. Here we find information seeking behavior to be the strongest influence not only on preparedness, but other PADM factors as well, such as intentions to prepare, feelings (positive and negative) about earthquake threat, knowledge of protective recommendations, and risk perception. Additionally, in our Portland, Oregon case study, we find significant gaps exist in terms of public understanding of earthquake hazards (liquefaction), and what to do during an earthquake. We also find that the majority of residents do not know their risk zone and have difficulty interpreting and using hazard maps. This research expands our understanding of the factors that influence household preparedness and highlights specific areas for improvement. Because hazards are a natural part of living on this planet, it is important that we consider the inherent risks and develop strategies to become more resilient.

Understanding the Improbable: A Survey of Fat Tails in Environmental Economics

We survey the growing literature on fat-tailed distributions in environmental economics. We then examine the theoretical and statistical properties of such distributions, focusing especially on when these properties are likely to arise in environmental problems. We find that a number of variables are fat tailed in environmental economics, including the climate sensitivity, natural disaster impacts, spread of infectious diseases, and stated willingness to pay. We argue that different fat-tailed distributions arise from common pathways. Finally, we review the literature on the policy implications of fat-tailed distributions and controversies over their interpretation. We conclude that the literature has made great strides in demonstrating when fat tails matter for optimal environmental policy. Yet, much is less well understood, including how alternative policies affect fat-tailed distributions, the optimal policy in a computational economy with many fat-tailed problems, and how to account for imprecision in empirical tests for fat tails. Expected final online publication date for the Annual Review of Resource Economics, Volume 13 is October 2021. Please see http://www.annualreviews.org/page/journal/pubdates for revised estimates.