PurposeThe transcript was developed in the context of a United Nations Office for Disaster Risk Reduction (UNDRR) project on the history of disaster risk reduction (DRR).Design/methodology/approachThe transcript provides an overview of the development of the field and changing paradigms in this regard.FindingsThe transcript contributes to documenting the history of disaster studies as a field of scholarship and disaster risk reduction as a field of policy and practice.Originality/valueThe interview highlights the importance of documenting the transitions, developments and paradigm changes in the field over time.

Providing adequate shelter after disasters is often a huge challenge to humanitarian agencies, whose interventions may reach only a small proportion of affected households. To overcome this problem, the international humanitarian shelter sector is increasingly adopting what is called a �self-recovery� approach that gives much greater choice and agency to disaster-affected households regarding their recovery pathways. This article reviews the concept of �self-recovery�, its application to housing reconstruction after disasters and the factors influencing its recent rise to prominence in humanitarian policy and practice. The article draws on academic studies, evidence generated by humanitarian agencies and the author�s involvement as observer and participant in recent self-recovery initiatives.

As experts predict that at least some irreversible climate change will occur with potentially disastrous effects on the lives and well-being of vulnerable communities around the world, it is paramount to ensure that these communities are resilient and have adaptive capacity to withstand the consequences. Adaptation and resilience planning present several ethical issues that need to be resolved if we are to achieve successful adaptation and resilience to climate change. In this paper, we present six core discussions that should be an integral part of adaptation and resilience planning: (i) Where does 'justice' feature in resilience and adaptation planning and what does it require in that regard?; (ii) How can it be ensured that adaptation and resilience strategies protect, take into consideration, and represent the interest of the most vulnerable individuals and communities?; (iii) How can different forms of knowledge be integrated within adaptation and resilience planning?; (iv) What trade-offs need to be made when focusing on resilience and adaptation and how can they be resolved?; (v) What roles and responsibilities do different actors have to build resilience and achieve adaptation?; (vi) Finally, what does the focus on ethics imply for the practice of adaptation and resilience planning?

This paper presents an interdisciplinary study of the spatiotemporal dynamics of seismic exposure. Out of the three components of risk—hazard, exposure, and vulnerability—exposure is the least studied, and is commonly treated as being constant in time. This approach neglects the dynamics associated with rapid development and urbanization, misrepresenting exposure in risk assessments. In this paper, mixed research methods are used to understand the dynamics of exposure in Santiago, the capital of Chile, between 1992 and 2017. First, residential exposure is modelled for three epochs using census data and public databases. Then, semi-structured interviews are conducted with local experts in engineering, planning, and disaster risk reduction to unveil the role of earthquake risk information in urban policy and development. Results show a steady expansion and densification of the city over the last 25 years, which is expected to continue in the future. The preferred building material for this growth is reinforced concrete, which rises from 3 to 17% as a proportion of the total structures in the city. It is also found that urban planning policy is disconnected from earthquake risk, which is perceived as a non-issue due to high local compliance with seismic codes. Thus, the continuous growth and homogenization of the built environment creates a singular dependence and blind trust in the local seismic academic and professional communities to provide earthquake resilience through safe buildings. These conditions configure a fragile but highly enabling environment for increasing seismic resilience in the city.

There is a paucity of empirical insights on how existing policies in disaster recovery and water, sanitation and hygiene (WASH) play out during disaster recovery in the Global South. This paper addresses this critical gap using the case study of 2013 Cyclone Phailin in Odisha. The data was collected through participatory and learning action tools and semi-structured interviews with key informants. This study found pervasive exclusion of women and local actors from recovery decision-making. The policies and guidance at national and subnational level lacked clear emphases on roles and responsibilities of the local governments, and did not emphasise their role in setting recovery objectives and priorities. We conclude that existing policies should emphasise immediate as well as longer-term WASH needs, adopt a multi-hazard perspective in preparedness and WASH policies, and feature WASH during recovery in the existing manuals, policies and programmes.

PurposeGlobally, over 95% of fire related deaths and injuries occur in low- and middle-income countries. Within informal settlements, the risk of fire resulting in injury or death is particularly high. This paper examines fire risks in informal settlements in New Delhi and Cape Town, and tented informal settlements in Lebanon.Design/methodology/approachOur analysis draws on primary sources, secondary literature, statistical data and qualitative interviews.FindingsThe distribution of fire risk across urban societies is a fundamentally political issue. Residential fire risk can be tackled by accessible, affordable, safety-compliant housing. That said, important interim measures can be taken to mitigate fire risk. Some of the risks requiring attention are similar across our case studies, driven by high population densities; flammable housing materials; unreliable or inaccessible access to safe power sources; and – in the case of Cape Town and New Delhi particularly – the inability of fire services to reach sites of fire. However, these common risks are embedded in distinct social, economic and political contexts that must be placed at the center of any intervention. Interventions must also be aware that the risk of fire is not spread evenly within informal settlements, intersecting as it does with factors like gender, age, health and disability.Originality/valueInformal settlement fires have been under-studied to date. The studies that do exist tend to operate within disciplinary silos. This paper represents an important interdisciplinary approach to fire within informal settlements, which grounds technical data, modeling and experiments in political, social and economic realities.

Following a disaster, the majority of families rebuild their homes themselves. In this paper, we consider how the physical environment influences such 'self-recovery' by investigating disasters in the Philippines (typhoons Haiyan in 2013 and Haima in 2016) and Nepal (the Gorkha earthquake 2015). Despite the many differences in the disaster contexts, there are some common barriers to self-recovery (and building back better) in a substantially changed and dynamic multi-hazard, post-disaster environment. These are related to changes in water supply (shortage or surplus), impacts of post-disaster geohazard events on infrastructure (particularly affecting transport) and the availability of technical advice. People face a broad spectrum of challenges as they recover and tackling these 'geo-barriers' may help to create a more enabling environment for self-recovery. The findings point to what needs to be in place to support self-recovery in dynamic physical environments, including geoscience information and advice, and restoration of infrastructure damaged by natural hazard events. Further research is necessary to understand the issues this raises for the shelter and geoscience communities, particularly around availability of geoscience expertise, capacity and information at a local scale.

Disasters occur when a hazard interacts with an exposed and vulnerable society or community, whose capacities to cope with the hazardous event are exceeded. The fact that large, damaging earthquakes impact different segments of society disproportionately can be perceived as an injustice. Conceptualizing this problem within the domain of justice implies a recognition that its source is the result of an unequal social system formed by a long sequence of human decisions, and not by God’s or nature’s desires. The discussion of disaster justice is still nascent, with the term itself being coined only in 2010. However, disaster justice can be understood as a concern of how the crisis and systemic collapse caused by disasters bring issues of socioecological justice to the front. Disaster justice stems from, builds on, and refers to some of the concepts and claims of environmental and climate justice, but expands them to address the scale, scope, dynamics, and challenges that are particular to disaster contexts as opposed to normal times. This article presents the different frameworks of social justice in the context of environmental hazards (i.e., environmental, climate, and disaster justice) and opens the discussion about how justice claims can be incorporated into the discussion and practice of providing seismic safety and increasing disaster resilience.

Chile is one of the most seismic yet also one of the most earthquake-resilient countries in the world. This article seeks to understand the process of resilience building in the country and its implications for urban contexts. For this purpose, semi-structured interviews are conducted to 16 Chilean experts from the fields of seismic engineering, urban planning, emergency management and disaster risk reduction (DRR), and representatives from different public and private stakeholders (e.g., academics, practitioners, public servants, local government authorities). Results show that the main approach that the Chilean state has used to provide seismic resilience has been purely rational, by means of safe and high-quality buildings. This has led to earthquake risk being essentially absent from the urban planning regulation. Although this approach has provided good overall results in time, over-reliance in seismic safety of buildings has contributed to a weak national DRR system which failed its most recent test after the 2010 earthquake and tsunami. The increasing complexity and concentration of people and assets in cities, together with the dynamism of knowledge about local seismicity are challenging this rational approach. Thus, a call for a more comprehensive approach for seismic resilience provision arises, which based on the successfully provided safe buildings could also tackle the social and political dimensions of earthquake risk in urban contexts.

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Among the three components of seismic risk—hazard, exposure and vulnerability—exposure is the least studied. This paper presents the preliminary results of a study on the temporal dynamics of seismic exposure in the last 25 years for the city of Santiago, Chile. Exposure models with a census-block resolution are built for two different epochs—1992 and 2017—and compared. Results show that the city has grown both horizontally (i.e., expanding) and vertically (i.e., densifying) in the study period. Also, that reinforced concrete is becoming the preferred building material, going from 3% to 17% of the total buildings in the city. Considering the constant update of seismic design regulations in Chile, the formality of construction, the high compliance to codes, and the constant evolution of building practice in Chile, these results imply that the city is evolving into a seismically safer state. This research is the first step towards a time-dependent seismic risk assessment for the city of Santiago. This tool will be used to further explore how urban planning decisions affect the evolution of risk in time.

Purpose Using risk-related data often require a significant amount of upfront work to collect, extract and transform data. In addition, the lack of a consistent data structure hinders the development of tools that can be used with more than one set of data. The purpose of this paper is to report on an effort to solve these problems through the development of extensible, internally consistent schemas for risk-related data. Design/methodology/approach The consortia coordinated their efforts so the hazard, exposure and vulnerability schemas are compatible. Hazard data can be provided as either event footprints or stochastic catalogs. Exposure classes include buildings, infrastructure, agriculture, livestock, forestry and socio-economic data. The vulnerability component includes fragility and vulnerability functions and indicators for physical and social vulnerability. The schemas also provide the ability to define uncertainties and allow the scoring of vulnerability data for relevance and quality. Findings As a proof of concept, the schemas were populated with data for Tanzania and with exposure data for several other countries. Research limitations/implications The data schema and data exploration tool are open source and, if widely accepted, could become widely used by practitioners. Practical implications A single set of hazard, exposure and vulnerability schemas will not fit all purposes. Tools will be needed to transform the data into other formats. Originality/value This paper describes extensible, internally consistent, multi-hazard, exposure and vulnerability schemas that can be used to store disaster risk-related data and a data exploration tool that promotes data discovery and use.

Buscher, M. (2017) In Wilkinson, E., Peters, K., Buscher, M., Fearnley, C., Helsloot, I., Twigg, J. Chapter 5. Disaster Risk Management, Section 5.2 Preparedness and Response Planning. Disaster Risk Management Knowledge Centre Report. Disaster Risk Management Knowledge Centre http://drmkc.jrc.ec.europa.eu

This brief provides an overview of The effectiveness and efficiency of interventions supporting shelter self-recovery following humanitarian crises – an evidence synthesis published in January 2017 by the Humanitarian Evidence Programme and carried out by a team at Habitat for Humanity and University College London. It summarizes key findings in response to the two main research questions identified, indicates the country contexts from which evidence is drawn, outlines the methodology, highlights research gaps and provides references to the original literature.