Disasters最新文献

While some communities appear to blossom in the wake of a disaster, others are left to struggle in the ashes. This paper introduces the concept of ‘conspicuous resilience’ to understand how emergent community-based recovery efforts privilege some needs while marginalising others, contributing to uneven forms of recovery. Drawing on a qualitative case study of the deadly Montecito debris flow in Southern California, United States, in January 2018, an in-depth examination of emergent community-based resilience efforts is gauged next to the social construction of unmet needs. Conspicuous acts of resilience centred around gaps in social and financial support as well as desires for protection from future debris flows. In defining and addressing needs, community-based interventions mirrored existing social inequalities and uneven relationships of power, promoting a false sense of equality and security while reinforcing private interests. To address the limits of conspicuous resilience, a justice-oriented politics of disaster recovery is needed.

Displacement in the context of disasters and climate change has gained considerable attention in international policy processes pertaining to migration and displacement over the past few years. However, analysis of currently dominant understandings of disaster displacement and its solutions at the global level, and how these translate into practice in relation to operational realities at the national level, remains scarce. This paper seeks to promote greater reflections on the discourse of displacement solutions in the context of disasters and climate change. It examines both the advancements and remaining gaps in approaches to disasters, displacement, and solutions and how these collectively shape the conceptualisation of solutions to disaster displacement. The inquiry sheds light on the dominant framings and their underlying assumptions and highlights the implications that they entail for understanding and responding to disaster displacement. It also underscores the importance of critical engagement with discursive practices at the international and national level.

The coronavirus pandemic and responses to it have had uneven impacts on different segments of societies. This study analysed the experiences of LGBTQIA+² people during the COVID-19 emergency, based on interviews in the United Kingdom and Brazil in 2020. The two countries are instructive cases, given the different social, cultural, economic, and political contexts. Pre-existing marginalisation shaped COVID-19 experiences in both settings, influencing the challenges faced, such as isolation or disruption to transgender healthcare, and coping strategies, including the important role of LGBTQIA+ volunteer and mutual aid groups. This paper argues that despite commonalities, there is no single LGBTQIA+ experience, and that disaster strategies will be ineffective until they recognise intersectionality and support the diversity of LGBTQIA+ populations. It concludes with a call for more inclusive disaster research, policy, and practice, which requires scrutinising the dominant cisgender–heteronormative structures that produce and reproduce LGBTQIA+ marginalisation.

Psychological First Aid (PFA) is widely used in the early phases of disaster recovery, despite limited empirical evidence supporting its application. PFA aims to reduce distress and encourage adaptive coping and is grounded in five principles: the promotion of hope, self- and collective efficacy, social connectedness, safety, and calm. Drawing on a constructivist perspective, this study analysed interview transcripts from Forged from Fire: The Making of the Blacksmiths' Tree, a documentary film about a community-led arts project initiated after the 2009 bushfires in Victoria, Australia. Using a reflexive process that employed deductive and inductive coding, the research investigated the presence of PFA principles in participants' experiences of the Blacksmiths' Tree project and whether themes not accounted for by PFA were also salient. The findings supported the PFA principles and generated two additional themes: grassroots and community leadership; and healing through creation and expression. The implications for disaster recovery in community settings are also presented.

The role of religious belief in disasters has attracted increased scholarly interest in recent years. This paper shows that religious belief can generate disaster resilience through the pathways of disaster framing, mental health, and disaster behaviours. Drawing on interviews conducted with Tibetan Buddhist believers in the Yushu earthquake area of China, this study indicates that notions of Tibetan Buddhism, as well as religious practices, helped locals to make sense of the 2010 event, obtain spiritual support in its aftermath, foster a sense of community, and develop a prosocial post-earthquake environment. These religious notions and practices also assisted in sustaining a faith-based network composed of two kinds of important local social relationships, layperson–layperson and layperson–monk, which increased local disaster resilience at the level of response behaviour. The findings enrich our understanding of the religious source of disaster resilience and yield insights into disaster risk reduction in religious regions, especially where Buddhist belief is prevalent.

Latin America and the Caribbean is one of the regions threatened most by natural events owing to the highly vulnerable circumstances of its urban centres. Consequently, its cities are occasionally affected by one or more disaster types, exposing problems of governance and public policy in relation to risk management. The aim of this research is to investigate the factors that influence the design of post-disaster policies. It hypothesises that in those countries with modes of governance characterised by greater articulation between State and non-State actors, the design of post-disaster policies tends to be more coherent. Methodologically, the study proposes a comparative analysis of post-disaster policies in three countries of the region affected by earthquakes: Haiti and Chile (in 2010) and Ecuador (in 2016). The findings show that co-governance in Chile resulted in optimal post-disaster policies, whereas hierarchical governance in the cases of Haiti and Ecuador led to unsuccessful and misdirected post-disaster policies, respectively.

A more anticipatory, pre-agreed response is a shared goal of many in the disaster management and humanitarian communities. This paper considers the emerging policy landscape of disaster risk financing (DRF), which is taken here to include mechanisms that allow agencies to act in advance of disasters occurring, as well as those that aim to respond earlier to disasters which have already happened. What they both have in common is no longer waiting for needs to become apparent before responding; however, this creates a challenge for practitioners because of the potential for acting erroneously. This paper provides a more cohesive way of understanding approaches in this policy area through the shared challenge of decision-making under the condition of uncertainty. Drawing on expert interviews and science and technology studies theory, it sets out some recommendations on how practitioners can navigate risk and uncertainty better within DRF and in a more nuanced way.

As climate change accelerates, adaptive social protection programmes are becoming increasingly more popular than conventional social assistance programmes, since they are seen to enhance people's resilience and well-being outcomes. Despite this upsurge, little is known about the impacts of adaptive programmes on resilience and well-being outcomes as compared to conventional programmes. This paper examines the economic functions that both types of social protection programmes offer through empirical studies in two climate-vulnerable zones in Bangladesh. By operationalising a simplified analytical framework to comprehend subjective resilience, the qualitative data reveal that the adaptive programme is more effective in enhancing beneficiaries' perceived resilience to climate risks. Regrettably, neither programme is found to contribute much significantly in terms of enabling beneficiaries to achieve the desired well-being outcomes that one might expect to see. The paper offers rich insights into the design components of the programmes, affording an on-the-ground understanding of their implications for resilience and well-being.

This research sought to identify differences in perceived stress and personal resilience across gender, race, and different types of stressors (such as rent or mortgage stress) among a sample of United States residents experiencing the COVID-19 pandemic. It used a cross-sectional, convenience sampling design for primary survey data collected over 10 weeks starting in April 2020 (n=374). Independent t-tests and binary logistic regression were performed to determine statistically significant differences between gender and race for perceived stress and personal resilience and to pinpoint key contributing factors. Results indicate women exhibited higher levels of stress, with non-IPV (intimate partner violence) reporting women evidencing higher levels of resilience than IPV reporting women. Racial minority women were more likely to experience nutritional stress, whereas White women were more likely to worry about rent or mortgage stress. These findings provide insight into disparate impacts across vulnerable populations at the start of a crisis with implications for improving pre- and post-disaster interventions.

The Australian bushfires in 2019–20 triggered massive amounts of charitable giving from the community. This study applied agenda-setting theory to examine if and how disaster news coverage influenced public donations in response to the crisis. A survey of 949 Australians found that people perceived news coverage of the event to be a strong influence on the amount they donated to bushfire appeals, over and above past giving levels. Furthermore, media coverage was more influential in participants' charity selection than both peer influence and direct communications from the charities. Next, a textual analysis of international news coverage of the event (N = 30,239 unique articles) was conducted. Compared to a control corpus of text, news coverage of the disaster used words related to ‘money’ and ‘support’ at disproportionately high frequencies. Together, the studies suggest that the media plays an agenda-setting role in determining how and to what extent people give to disaster appeals.