Disasters最新文献

Donor-funded climate and disaster resilience programmes and projects aim to help build the capacities and resilience of communities. Measuring resilience is critical, therefore, in providing feedback, evidence, and accountability. This paper presents recent two-year time-series findings from an ongoing multi-partner academic and practical collaboration pertaining to a climate change adaption project with rural communities in Cambodia. To measure community resilience, the study used the Flood Resilience Measurement for Communities, which measures, using mixed methods, disaster resilience capacities across five key dimensions of resilience: human, social, physical, natural, and financial capitals. The study analysed and reported changes in these areas of resilience in the selected villages, generating insights into the strengths and weaknesses of flood resilience capacities in the region. This paper provides valuable guidance as to where investment can be most effective in different communities, confirming the usefulness of the tool in measuring resilience and assessing the effectiveness of the project concerned.

While mental health and psychosocial support receive substantial international attention in humanitarian aid, the well-being of local aid agency staff themselves is often overlooked. This research, using an exploratory sequential mixed-methods design composed of two rounds of interviews (N = 23) and a survey (N = 146), highlights the constraints that local staff encounter to access psychosocial support. The study presents a snapshot of what mental health and psychosocial support is available for aid workers active in emergencies. Among local staff, 50 per cent deem the support not to be appropriate. The main causes are a lack of information regarding the available care, a lack of time to access care, and a lack of trust to access services provided through the employer. This paper suggests that agencies can improve local staff welfare by alleviating stressors related to short-term contracts, granting access to after-assignment care, and catering to a wider array of coping strategies.

Chinese humanitarian actors have worked frequently with the Chinese diaspora in disaster-affected areas, but little, if any, research has been conducted into the important role of the diaspora in disaster response and humanitarian assistance. This paper investigates what local knowledge the Chinese diaspora has offered to humanitarian actors from the People's Republic of China (PRC), and how this has contributed to their effectiveness. Based on a case study of the semi-autonomous Indonesian province of Aceh in the aftermath of the Indian Ocean tsunami of 2004, this paper argues that the diaspora can serve as a linchpin in local and international humanitarian action. It can do so by strengthening networks and bringing together local ethnic communities, local governments, and the PRC's humanitarian actors, while also offering local knowledge in the form of contextual memory. Such local knowledge may have to be fully utilised to address any underlying ethnic tensions in disaster-affected areas.

Recent policy discourse on the localisation of disaster management and humanitarian assistance lacks attention to the culture, history, and traditions of the Global South. This special issue of Disasters argues that it is imperative to recognise the dynamic, interactive, contested, and negotiated nature of local knowledge. Such local knowledge saves lives by enabling responders to situate ad hoc, one-off events such as disasters in the broader and deeper context of community relationships, thereby providing more appropriate and more effective aid. Through the cases of China, Japan, Indonesia, and the Philippines, this special issue examines such dynamic local knowledge using an analytical framework consisting of three manifestations of local knowledge, namely: social capital; contextual historical memories; and adaptation to new ideas. These three manifestations show the ways in which local knowledge creates local capacity, via which local, national, and international disaster respondents can centre their response coordination, and in turn, demonstrate how local capacity reformulates local knowledge.

This study combined network analysis with message-level content analysis to investigate patterns of information flow and to examine messages widely distributed on social media during Hurricane Irma of 2017. The results show that while organisational users and media professionals dominated the top 100 information sources, individual citizens played a critical role in information dissemination. Public agencies should increase their retweeting activities and share the information posted by other trustworthy sources; doing so will contribute to the timely exchange of vital information during a disaster. This study also identified the active involvement of nonprofit organisations as information brokers during the post-event stage, indicating the potential for emergency management organisations to integrate their communication efforts into those of nonprofit entities. These findings will inform emergency management practices regarding implementation of communication plans and policies, facilitate the embracement of new partner organisations, and help with establishing and sustaining effective communication ties with a wide range of stakeholders.

Breakthroughs in international biomedical science circa 1900 meant that plague could be contained through strict quarantine regulations. These measures were successfully deployed with help from local governments during outbreaks of pneumonic plague in Manchuria (1910–11), Shanxi (1918), and elsewhere in North China. This containment shows the effectiveness of uniting international knowledge and local cooperation in disaster response. Yet, in later outbreaks in similar locations, control measures identical to those instituted a decade earlier were rejected, and plague spread largely unchecked. Historical case studies of the control and spread of infectious disease in North China reveal the complexities of the relationship between global knowledge and its broader, local integration, variation in what constitutes effective ‘local’ cooperation in adopting international knowledge, and the paramount importance of the locality to the landscape of disaster response. History can reveal critical issues in localisation of disaster response still salient today.

There is increasing effort in science to support disaster risk management (DRM) and climate change adaptation in urban environments. It is now common for research calls and projects to reference coproduction methods and science uptake goals. This paper identifies lessons for researchers, research funders, and research users wishing to enable useful, useable, and used science based on the perspectives of research users in urban planning from low- and middle-income countries. DRM-supporting science is viewed by policy actors as: complicated and poorly communicated; presenting inadequate, partial, and outdated information; misaligned with policy cycles; and costly to access and inadequately positioned to overcome the policy barriers that hinder integration of DRM into urban planning. Addressing these specific concerns points to more systematic collection and organisation of data and enhancement of supporting administrative structures to facilitate better sight of human vulnerability and its link to development decision-making and wider processes of urban risk creation.

In the autumn of 2014, with the 2013–16 West Africa Ebola epidemic spiralling out of control, the United Kingdom announced a bespoke military mission to support—and in some ways lead—numerous Ebola response functions in Sierra Leone. This study examines the nature and effect of the civil-military relationships that subsequently developed between civilian and military Ebola response workers (ERWs). In total, 110 interviews were conducted with key involved actors, and the findings were analysed by drawing on the neo-Durkheimian theory of organisations. This paper finds that stereotypical opposition between humanitarian and military actors helps to explain how and why there was initial cooperative and collaborative challenges. However, all actors were found to have similar hierarchical structures and operations, which explains how and why they were later able to cooperate and collaborate effectively. It also explains how and why civilian ERWs might have served to exclude and further marginalise some local actors.

Disaster research predominantly focuses on citizens, not on migrants. This tilted spotlight needs to be readjusted, since many advanced countries around the world have become immigration countries, and safeguarding the lives of migrants at times of disaster has become an important and immediate policy issue. Hence, this research concentrates on disaster management to protect the lives of migrants in a disaster-prone and de facto immigration country. The particular country and event in question are Japan and the northern Osaka earthquake of June 2018. More than 100 migrants who lived near the earthquake's epicentre rushed to an evacuation shelter managed by the local municipal government of Minoh City, Osaka Prefecture. While non-governmental organisations attract more attention, this paper centres on a local government and demonstrates the key role that it can play in both bridging and building networks across different communities, and thus in safeguarding the lives of migrants at times of disaster.

Smooth interaction with a disaster-affected community can create and strengthen its social capital, leading to greater effectiveness in the provision of successful post-disaster recovery aid. To understand the relationship between the types of interaction, the strength of social capital generated, and the provision of successful post-disaster recovery aid, intricate ethnographic qualitative research is required, but it is likely to remain illustrative because it is based, at least to some degree, on the researcher's intuition. This paper thus offers an innovative research method employing a quantitative artificial intelligence (AI)-based language model, which allows researchers to re-examine data, thereby validating the findings of the qualitative research, and to glean additional insights that might otherwise have been missed. This paper argues that well-connected personnel and religiously-based communal activities help to enhance social capital by bonding within a community and linking to outside agencies and that mixed methods, based on the AI-based language model, effectively strengthen text-based qualitative research.