Search

This paper reflects on what materialised during recovery operations following the earthquake in L'Aquila, Italy, on 6 April 2009. Previous critiques have focused on the actions of the Government of Italy and the Department of Civil Protection (Protezione Civile), with little attention paid to the role of local authorities. This analysis sheds light on how the latter used emergency powers, the command-and-control approach, and top-down planning to manage the disaster context, especially in terms of removal of rubble, implementing safety measures, and allocating temporary accommodation. It discusses how these arrangements constituted the mechanism via which ‘disaster capitalism’ took hold at the local and national level, and how it violated human rights, produced environmental and social impacts, hindered local communities from learning, transforming, and building resilience, and facilitated disaster capitalism and corruption. To make the disaster risk reduction and resilience paradigm more effective, a shift from centralised civil protection to decentralised, inclusive community empowerment systems is needed.

Providing aid in times of increasing humanitarian need, limited budgets, and mounting security risks is challenging. This paper explores in what organisational circumstances evaluators judge, positively and negatively, the performance of international non-governmental organisations (INGOs) in response to disasters triggered by natural hazards. It assesses whether and how, as perceived by expert evaluators, CARE and Oxfam successfully met multiple institutional requirements concerning beneficiary needs and organisational demands. It utilises the Competing Values Framework to analyse evaluator statements about project performance and organisational control and flexibility issues, using seven CARE and four Oxfam evaluation reports from 2005-11. The reports are compared using fuzzy-set Qualitative Comparative Analysis. The resulting configurations show that positive evaluations of an INGO's internal and external flexibility relate to satisfying beneficiary needs and organisational demands, whereas negative evaluations of external flexibility pertain to not meeting beneficiary needs and negative statements about internal control concerning not fulfilling organisational demands.

In November 2018, Butte County, California, was decimated by the Camp Fire, the deadliest wildfire in state history. Over 150,000 acres were destroyed, and at its peak, the fire consumed eighty acres per minute. The speed and intensity of the oncoming flames killed scores of people, and weeks before the fire was contained, first responders began searching through the rubble of 18,804 residences and commercial buildings. As with most mass disasters, conventional identification modalities (e.g., fingerprints, odontology, hardware) were utilized to identify victims. The intensity and duration of the fire severely degraded most of the remains, and these approaches were useful in only 22 of 84 cases. In the past, the remaining cases would have been subjected to conventional DNA analysis, which may have required months to years. Instead, Rapid DNA technology was utilized (in a rented recreational vehicle outside the Sacramento morgue) in the victim identification effort. Sixty‐nine sets of remains were subjected to Rapid DNA Identification and, of these, 62 (89.9%) generated short tandem repeat profiles that were subjected to familial searching; essentially all these profiles were produced within hours of sample receipt. Samples successfully utilized for DNA identification included blood, bone, liver, muscle, soft tissue of unknown origin, and brain. In tandem with processing of 255 family reference samples, 58 victims were identified. This work represents the first use of Rapid DNA Identification in a mass casualty event, and the results support the use of Rapid DNA as an integrated tool with conventional disaster victim identification modalities.

Climate change is increasing the severity and the frequency of natural hazards and associated disasters worldwide, yet there is little data tracking how and whether it is being addressed by humanitarian assistance initiatives. Drawing on publicly available United Nations programme data and vulnerability indexes, this study pilots a novel approach to identifying and quantifying the prevalence of climate change-related humanitarian programmes from 2016-18 in five disaster-affected countries. The funding levels of proposed and undertaken interventions were analysed within specific programmatic sub-areas and across clusters. The study found that 1.8 per cent (99 of 5,558) of projects included in humanitarian proposals reviewed during the research have a climate change-related component. Of 1,361 funded projects, 40 of these were climate change-related and received funding. The methodologies tested here to assess and classify climate change-related humanitarian programmes could be expanded to support further tracking of humanitarian responses to climate change across operational contexts.

This paper reflects critically on the results of a vulnerability assessment process at the household and community scale using a quantitative vulnerabilities and capacities index. It validates a methodology for a social vulnerability assessment at the local scale in 62 villages across four agro-ecological/livelihood zones in Sindh Province, Pakistan. The study finds that the move from vulnerability narratives to numbers improves the comparability and communicational strength of the concept. The depth and nuance of vulnerability, however, can be realised only by a return to narrative. Caution is needed, therefore: the index can be used in conjunction with qualitative assessments, but not instead of them. More substantively, the results show that vulnerability is more a function of historico-political economic factors and cultural ethos than any biophysical changes wrought by climate. The emerging gendered vulnerability picture revealed extremes of poverty and a lack of capacity to cope with contemporary environmental and social stresses.

The Fukushima Health Management Survey (FHMS) was implemented in the wake of the 2011 Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant accident. The primary purpose of this survey was to monitor the long-term health of residents, promote their future well-being and confirm whether long-term low-dose radiation exposure affects health. The FHMS results indicated very low-radiation exposure doses among residents and that no discernible increased incidence of radiation-related health effects could be expected. However, psychological distress was found to be far greater among people in Fukushima than those in other areas affected by the accident’s preceding Great East Japan Earthquake and the resultant tsunami. Additionally, prevalence of lifestyle-related health problems such as being overweight, hypertension, diabetes mellitus, dyslipidaemia and liver dysfunction increased among evacuees. Thyroid examinations of asymptomatic individuals, using ultrasound techniques, also contributed to public concern and fear about the health effects of radiation. The FHMS ultimately revealed that ethical considerations are important in the design and implementation of health surveillance and epidemiological studies.

This paper investigates empirically how the international aid community (IAC)—donors and practitioners—considers and implements disaster resilience in a specific country setting, Nepal, and throughout the rest of the world. A key finding is that there is ambivalence about a concept that has become a discourse. On a global level, the IAC utilises the discourse of resilience in a cautiously positive manner as a bridging concept. On a national level, it is being used to influence the Government of Nepal, as well as serving as an operational tool of donors. The mythical resilient urban community is fashioned in the IAC's imaginary; understanding how people create communities and what type of linkages with government urban residents desire to develop their resilience strategies is missing, though, from the discussion. Disaster resilience can be viewed as another grand plan to enhance the lives of people. Yet, regrettably, an explicit focus on individuals and their communities is lost in the process.

This paper examines the vulnerability of households to disasters, using an asset vulnerability framework to represent livelihoods. Such frameworks are widely employed to analyse household poverty and focus on living conditions and well-being rather than money-metric measures of consumption and income. The conceptualisation of household vulnerability is a challenge in current studies on coping with disasters. The paper considers whether a capital assets framework is useful in identifying and assessing household vulnerability in the context of the Wenchuan earthquake in China in 2008. The framework has five categories of assets (financial, human, natural, physical, and social capital) and attempts to measure the resilience and vulnerability of households. When applied to a major disaster, asset-based methods face the problem of heterogeneity of the population, such as with regard to livelihood type or residence. Moreover, the effect of external interventions, such as the provision of relief assistance, must be taken into account.

This paper reflects on contemporary studies of and responses to disasters, highlighting the importance of historical, spatial, and intersectional modes of analysis, and draws on the author's ongoing research on Southern‐led and local community responses to displacement in the Middle East. Acknowledging the plurality of ‘international communities of response’, it begins by critiquing the depiction of selected responses to disasters as ‘positive’ ‘paradigm shifts’, including in reference to the ‘localisation of aid, and the United Nations’ Regional Refugee and Resilience Plan for Syria. Next it turns to three key themes that are central to disasters studies: migration; forced displacement; and Southern‐led responses to disasters. Among other things, the paper argues that exploring the principles and modalities of South–South cooperation, rather than promoting the incorporation of Southern actors into the ‘international humanitarian system’ via the localisation agenda, presents a critical opportunity for studies of and responses to disasters.