Preparing for Disaster: Building household and community capacity

Throughout human history, societies have been established and have developed, usually as a result of people's desire to profit from, benefit from, enjoy or utilize the physical, economic, and aesthetic amenities afforded by their natural environment, in areas that increase societal exposure to volcanic, wildfire, storm, flooding, tsunami, and seismic systems. Periodically, however, the activity of these often beneficial natural processes can interact with the human settlements in ways that create hazardous conditions for societies, their members and the institutions and infrastructure that people rely on to sustain normal functioning. When this happens, these natural processes become natural hazards. When societies and their members find themselves, by accident or design, having to co-exist with natural processes capable of threatening life and livelihood, there is much they can do to protect themselves from the potentially adverse consequences of hazard events. However, despite the evident advantages that being prepared confers on people and communities, and the fact that people are often aware of their risk, research has consistently found that individual, community, and business preparedness levels tend to be low. This book examines why this is so and identifies what can be done to expedite the development of sustained preparedness, at household, community, and societal levels. It does so by emphasizing the need for this aspect of social risk management to be based on engagement principles: how people engage with their natural environment, how they engage with each other, and how people and agencies and businesses engage with each other. An engagement-based approach to hazard preparedness portrays preparedness as a process in which multiple stakeholders (people, scientists, risk management specialists, government agencies, businesses, etc.) share responsibility for societal risk management and play complementary roles in how it develops and how it is sustained over time.