Module 3: Introduction to Hazards, Vulnerabilities and Disasters
4 Credits

Rationale

The course introduces some of the key concepts of disaster management. It provides a foundation by analyzing these key concepts and examining their interrelationship. The basic idea here is that disciplines like disaster management that draws from a range of other disciplines, such as engineering to medicine and from physical to social sciences; disaster management professional must have conceptual clarity on these basic concepts. Further this course is designed to enable the learner to gain an understanding of specific recurrent hazards such as earthquake, landslides, cyclones, tsunami etc. and develop the ability to scrutinize underlying notion of what is considered a hazard and what is a disaster from various theoretical perspective. The course also covers different quantitative approaches to measure hazard, vulnerability, and disaster risk and the role of qualitative approaches within such assessment.

• To develop a conceptual understanding on hazards, vulnerability and disasters
• To develop ability for undertaking hazard assessment, vulnerability and risk assessment
• To understand significance of these concepts and their implication in disaster management

UNIT 1 Hazards and Hazard studies

• Concept of hazard, Historical evolution of understanding on hazards, Primary, Secondary and tertiary effects of hazards – Examples of natural hazards (location , magnitude, frequency) Other important concepts – secondary and multiple hazards, chronic hazards, extreme weather events.
• Typology of hazards: Natural vs. human-made (including those resulting from anthropogenic climate change); Rate of onset and time-scale: slow, sudden or continuous; Type of event: Atmospheric, Seismic, Geologic, Hydrologic, Volcanic, Biologic, Technologic. Geographical impact: local, regional or global; Possible impact duration: punctual, limited, long-lasting, irreversible; Kind of Impact: life or health, food or water, housing
• Fundamental Principles concerning Natural Hazards -Earth systems -surface and subsurface processes – maps – data in virtual globes (e.g. Google earth, Bhuwan) – Basic calculations (using spreadsheets) and units - Plate tectonics – Distribution of earthquakes and volcanoes around the world- Seismicity (waves, Intensity, magnitude)- Volcanoes – Tsunamis (including basics of wave theory). Hydrologic cycle and Hydro Meteorological Phenomena – Drainage basins – Water balance – Floods – Droughts - Mass wasting – Storms – Cyclones–

UNIT 2 Hazard Assessment and Approaches

• Hazard assessment: When and where – Severity of the physical effects – Frequency of occurrence of hazard processes – Likely effects – Making all the above information available in a form useful to planners and public officials responsible for making decisions.
• Hazard assessment approaches: Information required – geologic, geomorphic, soil maps, climate and hydrological data, historical information. Quantitative approach – statistical; Qualitative approach – ranking, Deterministic approach – simulations based on past data and current conditions, Probabilistic approach – probability of occurrence, Hazard mapping and modeling

UNIT 3 Vulnerability and Disaster Risk

• Vulnerability; definitions, and conceptual frameworks - Human Ecology, Political Ecology, Political Economy, Sustainability Development Perspectives. Relationship of Vulnerability with Poverty, Resilience, Adaptive Capacity etc. Vulnerability as a cause and consequence of disasters; Addressing feedback effects between vulnerability and disasters.
• Concept of risk and disaster risk. Varying Notion of Risk: Objective Risk, Social and Cultural construction of risk, Social Amplification of risk.

UNIT 4 What is a Disaster?

Concept of Disaster, Historical evolution of the term 'disaster', Differentiating between natural hazards, accidents, emergencies, calamity, catastrophes and disasters. Symptoms of disasters vs. causes of disasters, how does a disaster come about? Past decisions (individual, collective, those by default), Understanding factors contributing to a disaster: hazards, exposure, risk, vulnerability, capacity. Development and its inter-linkages with disaster, Impacts of disasters – social, political, economic, physical, cultural, institutional, environmental; arising from conflict

UNIT 5 Disaster Risk and Vulnerability Assessment

Approaches/methods to measuring (modeling) disaster risk and vulnerability (qualitative, quantitative, mixed), Parameterization, Indicators of disaster risk and vulnerability (general vulnerability indices, vulnerability indices and climate variability, social vulnerability metrics and mapping techniques), Validating the indices

• Hewitt, K. 1983. “The idea of calamity in technocratic age” in Hewitt, K. (eds) Interpretation of Calamity from the viewpoint of Human Ecology, Allen and Unwin, London.
• Wisner, B., Blaikie, P., Cannon, T. and Davis, I. 2004. At Risk: Natural Hazards, People's Vulnerability and Disasters, Second Edition, Routledge, London.
• Burton, I., Kates, R.W. And White, G.F. 1968. “The Human Ecology of Extreme Geophysical Events”, Natural Hazard Research, Working Paper#1
• Quarantelli, E. L. 1998 (eds) What is a Disaster? Perspectives on the Question, Routledge, London.
• Dreze, J. and Sen, A. 1994. The Political Economy of Hunger: Selected Essays, Oxford University Press, Oxford.
• Bankoff, G. 2001. “Rendering the World Safe: Vulnerability as Western Discourse”, Disasters, 25 (1): 19-35.
• Bankoff, G., Frerks, G. and Hilhorst, D. 2004. (eds.) Mapping Vulnerability: Disasters, Development, and People, Earthscan, London.
• Birkmann, J. 2007. “Risk and vulnerability Indicators at Different Scales: Applicability, Usefulness and Policy Implications”, Environmental Hazards, 7 (1): 20-31.
• Grandjean, D., Rendu, A., Macnamee, T. and Scherer, C. 2008. "The wrath of the Gods: appraising the meaning of disaster", Social Science Information, 47(2): 187-204
• Levine, C. 2004. “The Concept of Vulnerability in disaster Research”, Journal of traumatic Stress, 17(5): 395-402.
• Vaughan, D. 2004. "Theorizing Disaster: analogy, historical ethnography, and the challenger accident", Ethnography, 5(3): 315-347
• Cohen, C. and Werker, E.D. 2008. "The Political Economy of "Natural" Disasters", Journal of Conflict Resolution, 52(6): 795-818
• O’Keefe, P., Westgate, K. and Wisner, B. 1976. “Taking the Naturalness out of Natural Disasters”, Nature, 260: 566-567.
• Su, C. 2012. "One earthquake, two tales: narrative analysis of tenth anniversary coverage of 921 earthquake in Taiwan", Media, Culture and Society, 34(3): 28-295
• Furedi, F. 2007. "From the narrative of the blitz to the rhetoric of vulnerability", Cultural Sociology, 1(2): 235-254
• Karuson, K. and MacManus, S.A. 2011. "Gauging Disaster Vulnerabilities at the Local Level: Divergence and Convergence in an all Hazard System", Administration and Society, XXX:1-26
• Ray-Bennet, N. 2009. "The influence of Caste, Class and Gender in surviving multiple disaster", Environmental Hazards, 8:5-22
• Duff, P.M. 1994. Holmes' Principles of Physical Geology. Chapman and Hall.
• Fookes, P.G., Lee, E.M., Griffiths, J.S. 2007. Engineering Geomorphology – Theory and Practice. Whittles Publishing Co.
• Helal, M.A., and Mehanna, M.S. 2008. Tsunamis from Nature to Physics. Chaos, Solitons and Fractals. 36, 787-796.
• Highland, L.M., and Bobrowsky, Peter, 2008, The landslide handbook—A guide to understanding landslides: Reston, Virginia, U.S. Geological Survey Circular 1325, 129 p.
• Keller, E.A. 2008. Introduction to Environmental Geology. Prentice Hall
• Lowrie, W. 1997. Fundamentals of Geophysics. Cambridge University Press.
• Singh, V.P. 1994. Elementary Hydrology. Prentice Hall.
• UNESCO. 1999. Flash Floods in Arid and Semi Arid Zones. IHP-V 1 Technical Documents in Hydrology . No. 23.

• https://earthkam.ucsd.edu/resources/geography_standards National Geography Education Standards
• https://earthkam.ucsd.edu/files/activit… atLong.pdf Latitude-Longitude
• https://earthkam.ucsd.edu/files/activit … erstanding Maps.pdf Understanding maps of earth
• http://earthquake.usgs.gov/learn/topics … topicID=77 Earthquakes topics
• http://wcatwc.arh.noaa.gov/characteristics.htm Tsunami Basics NOAA
• http://serc.carleton.edu/NAGTWorkshops/ … rch=search Resources
• http://myweb.usf.edu/~juster/GLY2030/hazard-risk-v3.pdf Introduction Hazard and Risk
• http://volcanoes.usgs.gov/hazards/index.php : Volcano
• http://serc.carleton.edu/NAGTWorkshops/ … unami.html
• http://techalive.mtu.edu/meec/demo/Watershed.html Watershed delineation flash
• http://pubs.usgs.gov/circ/1325/ Guide Landslides
• http://blogs.scientificamerican.com/gue … cate-well/ Italian seismologists are on trial