Risk and Disaster Management

Creating visible public notifications of risk can be a way to avoid damages.

Successfully managing risk and disasters is a complicated task, but a very important one. Risk managers help governments and private industries protect as much of their people and assets as they can by evaluating as many variables as possible to compute efficient paths to safety.

What is Risk?

The Federal Emergency Management Agency defines risk as the probability that an event will occur combined with the consequences of its occurrence. For some hazards, the probability of occurrence is almost guaranteed over a long time period--there's a reason why each year has a "hurricane season." The consequences of occurrence can be more difficult to assess, since the way we build our cities or educate the public on natural hazard risks are strong factors in mitigating the consequences of a disaster.

The Built Environment

The built environment is the urban and technological infrastructure that we live in, as opposed to a naturally occurring environment, such as forests or grass plains. Managing the built environment is key to managing the risks of disasters and natural hazards. When an investor considers the financial risks of building a new project, disasters are not always one of the factors they include in their assessment. If a project is deemed seismically unsafe after completion, the costs to remediate the dangers are extreme when compared to incorporating safety features during initial construction.

Disaster Context

One of the most challenging parts of risk management in a disaster framework is just how many variables are involved. A disaster is defined by the United Nations as a serious disruption of the functioning of a community or a society causing widespread human, material, economic or environmental losses that exceed the ability of the affected community or society to cope using its own resources. This means that total risk management in a disaster involves the economy, environmental damages, social capacity and structural aspects.

Extent of Hazards

Managing risks means taking account of all the possible variables of a given project. If that project is managing disasters, then the extent of all natural hazards that could occur in the managed area should be known and defined. For instance, if a coastal city has a long history of hurricane activity, then the risks of hurricanes such as wind damage and flooding should receive high priority in management activities. It is useful to define the spatial extent of a hazard as well, for instance, how far inland the flooding hurricane storm waves will reach or if certain areas are high enough in elevation to not worry about flooding.

What to do with the Facts?

Knowing where and how a hazard is likely to unfold allows risk managers to more efficiently use resources. It would be hard to justify using municipal budget money on hurricane safety in a far inland state when that money would be better spent on drought or wildfire protections. Even if the money is being spent on relevant disaster management projects, risk managers still have to define just how big the safety net should be. Unfortunately there isn't always enough budget money to go around, and risk managers have to do just what their name implies: manage risks, not prevent every possible bad thing from happening.

References

• FEMA: Hazard Risk Assessment Methods, sections 8 and 11
• FEMA: Risk Definition
• Risk Management Standard
• UNISDR Terminology: Disaster