Disaster risk management

Abstract

Disaster risk management is a comprehensive approach involving the identification of threats due to hazards; processing and analyzing threats; understanding people’s vulnerability; assessing communities’ resilience and coping capacity; developing strategies for future risk reduction; and building up capacities and operational skills to implement the proposed measures. Disaster risk cannot be eliminated completely, but it can be assessed and managed in order to mitigate the impact of disasters (Smith and Petley 2009). The management of disaster risks has attracted much attention since the 2005 initiative of the International Strategy for Disaster Reduction (ISDR 2004), which defined the Ten Essentials required to empower local governments and other agencies to implement the Hyogo Framework for Action by the year 2015.