Societal Aspects of Vulnerability to Natural Hazards

Global evaluation of human risk and vulnerability to natural hazards

This paper describes some methodological aspects of the development of the Disaster Risk Index (DRI), a central component of the Reducing Disaster Risk report from the United Nation Development Programme (UNDP/BCPR 2004). The DRI aims to improve understanding of the relationship between development and disaster risk at the global level. The major assumption behind the index is that differences ...

Reducing People’s Vulnerability to Natural Hazards Communities and Resilience

The concepts vulnerability, resilience and community are widely used and abused in the literature on natural hazards and disaster risk reduction. This paper seeks to bring greater rigour in their use. In particular, vulnerability must be understood as a set of socioeconomic conditions that are identifiable in relation to particular hazard risks, and therefore perform a predictive role that can ...

Temporal and spatial changes in social vulnerability to natural hazards.

During the past four decades (1960-2000), the United States experienced major transformations in population size, development patterns, economic conditions, and social characteristics. These social, economic, and built-environment changes altered the American hazardscape in profound ways, with more people living in high-hazard areas than ever before. To improve emergency management, it is impor...

Social Vulnerability to Environmental Hazards

Objective. County-level socioeconomic and demographic data were used to construct an index of social vulnerability to environmental hazards, called the Social Vulnerability Index (SoVI) for the United States based on 1990 data. Methods. Using a factor analytic approach, 42 variables were reduced to 11 independent factors that accounted for about 76 percent of the variance. These factors were pl...

Reducing Societal Vulnerability to Drought: Future Challenges