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A Resilience Charter

Emergency Planning

The increasing vulnerability and dwindling redundancy of life-support systems will aggravate the effect of proliferating failure among critical infrastructure networks. Safety’ refers to protection against major hazards such as storms, floods and industrial explosions. At all levels the system must be integral, robust and complete.

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Book Review: Constructing Risk

Recovery Diva

These statements document incremental progress to recognizing the principal message and caution of this book, that our development practices—the ways we build on the land—too often resulting in increasing risk of disaster, when they could and should be doing the opposite, reducing risk to natural disaster, climate change and sea level rise.

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The 2019 Global Assessment Report (GAR)

Emergency Planning

The United Nations International Strategy for Disaster Reduction was born out of the International Decade for Natural Disaster Reduction, 1990-2000. On 1 May 2019 it was renamed the UN Office for Disaster Risk Reduction. Unofficial voices have suggested that the 'cure to damage ratio' for natural hazards is 1:43.

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Towards a Taxonomy of Disasters

Emergency Planning

While not independent of the magnitude of physical forces involved, it is not linearly related to them because it depends on the nature and size of the vulnerabilities that the physical forces act upon. d) Intentional disasters, comprising all forms of terrorism and sabotage. (e) Disaster is fundamentally a social phenomenon.

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Haiti: has there been progress in disaster reduction since the last big earthquake?

Emergency Planning

As bodies piled up on street corners and in courtyards there was no time to count them all. A changing situation The eminent anthropologist Anthony Oliver-Smith argued [vi] that in Haiti colonialism has left an enduring legacy of vulnerability to disasters. Haiti has long had a shortage of all three.

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Disasters: Knowledge and Information in the New Age of Anomie

Emergency Planning

Vast resources are now devoted to distorting the picture, and all three superpowers are busy utilising them (Druzin and Gordon 2018, Merrin 2019, Rudick and Dannels 2019). Any attempt to relate the current anomie to disaster risk reduction (DRR) must take account of the 'egg hypothesis'. Alexander, D.E.

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Common Misconceptions about Disaster

Emergency Planning

Myth 17: Unburied dead bodies constitute a health hazard. Reality: Not even advanced decomposition causes a significant health hazard. Not all useful resources that existed in the area before the disaster will be destroyed. Myth 27: In order to manage a disaster well it is necessary to accept all forms of aid that are offered.