Climate Change’s Role in Disaster Risk Reduction’s Future:Beyond Vulnerability and Resilience

A seminal policy year for development and sustainability occurs in 2015 due to three parallel processes that seek long-term agreements for climate change, the Sustainable Development Goals, and disaster risk reduction.Little reason exists to separate them, since all three examine and aim to deal with many similar processes, including vulnerability and resilience. This article uses vulnerability and resilience to explore the intersections and overlaps amongst climate change, disaster risk reduction, and sustainability. Critiquing concepts such as 'return to normal'and 'double exposure'demonstrate how separating climate change from wider contexts is counterproductive. Climate change is one contributor to disaster risk and one creeping environmental change amongst many, and not necessarily the most prominent or fundamental contributor. Yet climate change has become politically important, yielding an opportunity to highlight and tackle the deep-rooted vulnerability processes that cause 'multiple exposure'to multiple threats. To enhance resilience processes that deal with the challenges, a prudent place for climate changewould be as a subset within disaster risk reduction. Climate change adaptation therefore becomes one of many processes within disaster risk reduction. In turn, disaster risk reduction should sit within development and sustainability to avoid isolation from topics wider than disaster risk. Integration of the topics in this way moves beyond expressions of vulnerability and resilience towards a vision of disaster risk reduction’s future that ends tribalism and separation in order to work together to achieve common goals for humanity.

Children with Disabilities and Disaster Risk Reduction: A Review

Children with disabilities are often excluded from disaster risk reduction (DRR) initiatives and, as a result, can experience amplified physical, psychological, and educational vulnerabilities. Research on children with disabilities during disasters is lacking, and their potential value in helping shape inclusive policies in DRR planning has been largely overlooked by both researchers and policymakers. This article highlights the existing research and knowledge gap. The review includes literature from two areas of scholarship in relation to disasters—children, and people with disabilities—and provides a critique of the prevailing medical, economic, and social discourses that conceptualize disability and associated implications for DRR. The article analyzes the different models in which disability has been conceptualized, and the role this has played in the inclusion or exclusion of children with disabilities in DRR activities and in determining access to necessary resources in the face of disaster. Finally, the study explores possible pathways to studying the contribution and involvement of children with disabilities in DRR.

Persistent Precarity and the Disaster of Everyday Life: Homeless People’s Experiences of Natural and Other Hazards

Knowledge of how homeless people deal with natural hazards and disasters is sparse and there is a remarkable absence of homeless people in policies and practices for disaster risk reduction(DRR). This article aims at filling this gap by exploring the lives of homeless people in two New Zealand cities that are exposed to natural hazards. It shows that natural hazards are of marginal concern to homeless people in comparison to the everyday hazards that they experience and that make their everyday life a disaster in itself. The disaster of everyday life is created and compounded by homeless people’s precarious lifeworlds. The article, nonetheless, shows that homeless people’s vulnerability to natural hazards remains high as they lack power to control the processes that shape their everyday lives, to prepare for large-scale events, and to be represented in DRR policy. Therefore, the article ultimately argues that disaster policies require greater attention to be paid to the power structures that create persistent precarity and the ways in which this is experienced in everyday life.

An Empirical Exploration of the Capabilities of People with Disabilities in Coping with Disasters

While the capability approach is increasingly being adopted for evaluating well-being and social justice in the field of human development,this approach in disaster research has remained scarce.This research thus seeks to address the disaster risk that humans face through a lens of capabilities,with a focus on the lives of people with disabilities.A multi-case study approach was adopted and two rural communes in Vietnam were selected as study con texts.Data were collected using focus group discussions and interviews that involved people with disabilities,parents/caregivers of people with intellectual/psychosocial disabilities,and representatives from related organizations.It was found that people with disabilities are affected by disasters due to the lack of capabilities that they value in coping with disasters.A range of capabilities that people with disabilities value was revealed in the study sites,with many being valued not only in times of disasters but also in daily life.The findings also highlight that,to actualize their valued capabilities,people with disabilities need access not only to resources but also to the factors that enable them to convert the resources to their valued capabilities.In most cases,the limitations to the achievement of capabilities are related to the external environment.

Fostering Children’s Participation in Disaster Risk Reduction Through Play:A Case Study of LEGO and Minecraft

This article focuses on children’s participation in disaster risk reduction.It draws on a 2018 study done in New Zealand with 33 school children who conducted participatory mapping with LEGO and the video game Minecraft to assess disaster risk in their locality and identify ways to be more prepared.The research involved participatory activities with the children actively involved in the co-design,implementation,and evaluation of the initiative.A focus group discussion was also conducted to assess the project from the viewpoint of the schoolteachers.The results indicate that LEGO and Minecraft are playful tools for children to participate in disaster risk reduction.The research identifies four key elements of genuine children’s participation,including the Participants,Play,the Process,and Power(4 Ps).This framework emphasizes that fostering children’s participation in disaster risk reduction requires focusing on the process through which children gain power to influence decisions that matter to them.The process,through play,is child-centered and fosters ownership.The article concludes that Play is essential to ground participation within children’s worldviews and their networks of friends and relatives.