Approaches To Disaster Management Essay Example
Approaches To Disaster Management Essay Example

Approaches To Disaster Management Essay Example

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  • Pages: 3 (643 words)
  • Published: April 24, 2022
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Emergency management being a management function seeks to promote safety through creating frameworks within which societies reduce vulnerability to hazards and thus control the disaster. Disasters are usually devastating accidental, natural or human-induced events that lead to severe social and economic consequences to the people they affect. Disaster consequences include loss of life and property, physical injury, emotional and physical hardships, failure of operational and administration systems and destruction of physical infrastructure. There are no countries on the planet that are immune to emergencies especially those caused by natural calamities. For example, natural calamities such as volcanic eruptions, earthquakes, tornadoes, hurricanes, forest fires, mud slides, toxic leakages and power outages can occur to any area (Coppola, 2011).

Approaches to disaster management focus significantly focus on the components of emergency management which include prevention and mitigation, emergency and preparedness, response a

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nd recovery (Rahman., Khan, & Shaw, 2015). Prevention and mitigation reduce or sometimes prevent disaster impacts from affecting the people. Prevention and mitigation also save the financial costs resulting from disaster response and recovery. Emergency preparedness requires support training, planning and testing emergency management strategies and plans and then shares the experiences and lessons learned from them. Emergency preparedness efforts employed prior a disaster event help in supporting emergency response impacts reduction and identification of future mitigation and prevention efforts. Recovery from emergency events requires financial assistance of the affected persons from all available sources depending on the magnitude of the disaster.
Risk- based approach influences the components of emergency management. The strategy advocates for identification and vulnerability assessment of all disasters and then establishes the optimal balance and integration of techniques to address risks and vulnerability (Simonovic

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2013). Hazard vulnerability constitutes a risk. Risk management ensures clarification of the risk dimensions such as causes, its occurrence probability, and severity of possible consequences and therefore improve decision making. A strong emphasis on risk mitigation measures is a sustainable approach to reducing the social-economic costs related to an emergency that occurs for using strategies that entirely focus on preparedness and response. Prevention measures reduce vulnerability while increasing resilience. Failure to adequately manage risks produces extremely adverse consequences to the society.

All-hazards approach addresses all vulnerabilities that are either natural or human-induced. All-hazards approach recognizes and integrates common elements of emergency management across all types of hazards and then supplement these common components with the specific hazard sub-components to fill any gaps thus increase efficiency.

Resilience, clear communication and continuous improvements are other approaches for emergency management. The process of the citizen, government and organization empowerment to share disaster prevention ideologies builds resilience among them. Resilience mitigates dependence, vulnerability, and susceptibility by strengthening the physical and social capacity of people to adapt to, cope with, respond to, recover and learn from calamities (Rahman., Khan, & Shaw, 2015).

Clear communication by relevant authorities is critical and necessary continuous process before, during and after a disaster. Before an emergency, communication aims to provide public education regarding emergency management. Clear communication during public awareness campaigns inform them of risks, vulnerabilities, and hazards and thus strengthen the components of emergency management (Rahman., Khan, & Shaw, 2015). Public alerts communicate warning messages before the occurrence of a disaster. During and after a disaster, communication guides people on the responsive actions to prevent impacts and maintain security and safety.

Continuous improvement results from lessons learned

from the experience of an emergency. Continuous improvement focuses on increasing efficiency and effectiveness of disaster management actions. Documentation of a calamity occurrence helps minimize recurrence of similar problems in future. Replication of all of the above management strategies in the United States can significantly reduce the impacts of hazards affecting the region.

References

  1. Coppola, D. (2011). Introduction to international disaster management. Boston: Butterworth-Heinemann.
  2. Rahman, Khan, A. & Shaw, R. (2015). Disaster risk reduction approaches in Pakistan. Tokyo: Springer.
  3. Simonovic, S. (2013). Systems approach to management of disasters: methods and applications. Hoboken, N.J: Wiley.
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