How Natural Disaster Risk Factors of Hazard, Exposure and Vulnerability May Be Managed Positively

by Prof Benito Pacheco, University of the Philippines Diliman, Philippines; paper presented at the 5th Civil Engineering Conference in the Asian Region (CECAR5) and Australasian Structural Engineering Conference 2010 (ASEC 2010), 8-12 August 2010, Sydney, Australia.

ABSTRACT: From the author's earlier papers on multi-hazard disaster risk management framework, a new proposal is made to look at natural disaster risk factors of hazard, exposure, and vulnerability and to associate specific risk management actions with specific sectors or disciplines, in such ways that lead to overall reduction of disaster risk. As the backdrop to the paper, the author uses the R-I-S-K spiral framework of disaster risk management, comprising four typical steps: recognize risk or risk factors; impute estimates; survey the risk or risk factors over time; and keep them within tolerance range. Natural hazard management may be the main task of natural scientists and engineers; to keep hazards within tolerance range may mean to avoid, reduce, etc. Human hazard management may be the task of social scientists and business people; to act may mean to prevent, reduce, etc. Exposure management may be the main task for local governments as well as health workers: to defer, transfer, reduce, etc. Vulnerability management may be for engineers as far as properties are concerned, for health workers as far as lives are involved, and for business people where it concerns ways of life: to reduce, diversify, share, retain, or enhance. In the paper, the author also reiterates an earlier proposal to recognize three generic risk objects: life, property, and way of life. The three may be associated essentially with three types of risk: pure normal risk (for life), pure catastrophic risk (for property), and speculative risk (for way of life). The paper concludes by pointing to the socio-economic dimension: how human hazard, social exposure, and economic vulnerability create speculative risk that, ironically, calls for risk enhancement rather than risk reduction.

Obtained from: http://www.cecar5.com/abstract/542.asp.  Or, visit the official CECAR5/ASEC2010 website at http://www.cecar5.com/.