[Radix] Re: Radix Digest, Vol 59, Issue 5

Sun Feb 4 21:54:01 PST 2007

Thanks Marla - use it in good health!

Actually this exercise also sets up a full day risk analysis exercise which we either do as a desktop (using members of a real community) or a field visit to interview community leaders. The participant's final product is a framework for risk reduction in that community but to get there requires many steps that demand a consensus on the terms being used. The workplan has to identify the 3 most important health/safety risks in that community, and for each risk, define one hazard mitigation measure, one vulnerability reduction measure and one capacity building measure, plus one outcome indicator for each.

Rodger

________________________________

From: radix-bounces at ecie.org on behalf of Marla Petal
Sent: Sun 04/02/2007 04:25
To: radix at ecie.org
Subject: [Radix] Re: Radix Digest, Vol 59, Issue 5

Brilliant but simple exercise Rodger, many thanks for this - it could be used in many different training settings. 
And after that the rest of the more pedantic points are moot.
Then I assume one could move on to.... "what could different groups of stakeholders have been done to mitigate those",

Marla Petal

On Feb 3, 2007, at 1:13 PM, radix-request at ecie.org wrote:

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	Message: 1
	Date: Sat, 3 Feb 2007 15:12:46 +0700
	From: "Doran, Dr Rodger \(VTN\)" <doranr at vtn.wpro.who.int>
	Subject: RE: [POSSIBLE SPAM] - Re: [POSSIBLE SPAM] - [Radix] Re:
	Contents of Radix digest, Vol 58, Issue 1 - Email found in subject -
	Email found in subject
	To: "Omar D. Cardona A. BOG" <ocardona at uniandes.edu.co>, "George Kent"
	<kent at hawaii.edu>
	Cc: radix at ecie.org, JC Gaillard
	<Jean-Christophe.gaillard at ujf-grenoble.fr>
	Message-ID:
	<16F02CA5D7AE2A4A81EDE5390CA10A66046244 at vtn1001.vtn.wpro.who.int>
	Content-Type: text/plain; charset="iso-8859-1"

	Hi Omar - I do a similar exercise for out courses - I ask the participants the take 6 coloured cards and work alone to write : 3 disasters, then 3 hazards, then 3 emergencies, then 3 risks, then 3 vulnerabilities and then after in the session, the name of the community that they belong to. Then I ask them to work in groups to reconcile their lists and come up with a final group effort, which they then defend in debate against the other groups, fllowed by a wrap up session. It takes quite a lot of time but is really worth it in longer courses. The advantage is that they have an opportunity to debate the difficulties that they have in reaching consensus on terms, rather than be just passive (and disintrested) recipients of the terms in my PowerPoint that closes the session. I am contantly amazed by how difficult everyone finds the first part of the exercise (these are people who have worked in disasters for years) and how lively and passionate the debate is in the second part!
	. Also interesting is how much trouble thay have in defining their own personal community, even though they readily nominate "community" as the principle beneficiary of eveything they do (clearly without having thought much about what a community might be).

	One area of difficulty we have is that I work in a region where there is no common regional language. Each country has its own language and English is a (usually weak) second or even third language. Few languages here distinguish between these words very closely. These concepts expressed in english can be very subtle and I am often unsure if they are really understood. All I can hope to do is help people understand the terms when they read them in english, and reccommend that their national committies work on developing lexicons in their own language.

	Conceptual frameworks are important and very necessary. But we need to know is disaster risk reduction achievable? is what we do effective? are we making a difference? are investments in risk reduction/mitigation/preparedness making a return? to answer these questions we need indicators that measure specific areas of the concept. I feel uncomfortable lobbying for more investment in my own area of interest when I know I can't hope to support my case in the way that my other colleagues in public health can for their areas. My vision of the future is solid evidence based strategies for disaster risk reduction that I can defend robustly in the court of epidemiology. The World Disaster Report does not yet do help me do that. I download the raw data for the report every year and then have to spend a good few hours "cleaning" it to get rid of the errors - not the numbers, but typos/spelling mistakes (india and indai), words ending with a space (in a database, india[space] is a diff!
	erent country from india), compatibility errors (eg countries allocated to different regions in different years, changed column order etc). (Knowing these errors are there makes me very wary of using other peoples interpretations of this data).

	But we can't hope to get countries to improve their data collection when we can't tell them what to measure and how to do it. But if we dont have the data,will we ever know if all we are doing is actually making adifference?

	Rodger

	________________________________

	From: radix-bounces at ecie.org on behalf of Omar D. Cardona A. BOG
	Sent: Fri 02/02/2007 20:55
	To: George Kent; Doran, Dr Rodger (VTN)
	Cc: JC Gaillard; radix at ecie.org
	Subject: [POSSIBLE SPAM] - Re: [POSSIBLE SPAM] - [Radix] Re: Contents of Radix digest,Vol 58,Issue 1 - Email found in subject - Email found in subject

	When I start the course on integrated disaster risk managment in the university I always request to all of my students a definition of disaster in the first day... because one would supose they should know why they decide to study that course... In the end of the course I made the question again to all... it is very interesting how their definition change. 

	My reflection is that the conceptual framework for the understanding a problem certainly is essential to solve it. Differences in the meaning of disaster or risk may impede successful, efficient and effective reduction. For example, if we accept that disaster implies loss and damage and consequential impacts that the affected community is unable to absorb or to cushion the effects and recover using its own resources and reserves. This suggests that there are levels and types of loss and damage that do not signify disaster for society. Then, disaster is a given situation, a product that is tangible and measurable. In addition, disaster supposes the prior existence of determined risk conditions. That is to say, disaster is the materialization of pre-existing risk. This perspective is a step for a better understanding of the problem and it has relevant implications in the way how we face the problem; however for many persons disaster and risk are the same... and there are no!
	t reflexions about the difference of ex ante and ex post actions... 

	The concepts of disaster and risk are certainly relative, normative and they depends of scale, context, volume, time, or for who they exist, etc. but they are key concepts any way for reduction or management. In some cases, the purpose of terms is not only to have an accurate definition but to contribute to decision-making. It means that the underlaying concept is "control" and not only to reveal the "truth"... For example, the problem in our case is not if an event is an accident, emergency, disaster, catastrophe, and other terms (discution posed by Quarantelli) the problem is the "implications" of the event and "for who", and therefore the type of "response" and "dicision-making".

	Lastly, after the program of indicators on disaster risk and risk management for the Americas, suported by the IADB, we agree to have a terminology and a conceptual framework and then we decided to have a "long" definition (explanation) for disaster....

	DISASTER: A social process triggered by a natural, socio-natural or humanly induced phenomenon which, due to vulnerability conditions in the population, infrastructure and economic systems, causes intense, serious and extended alterations in the normal functioning of the affected country, region, zone or community to the extent that these are unable to autonomously respond to and resolve the problems using their own resources. The alterations may be diverse and differentiated, including the loss of life, health problems amongst the population, damage, loss or destruction of collective and individual goods and damage to the environment. These require immediate response by the goverment and the population in order to attend to the needs of the affected population and restore acceptable levels of well-being and life opportunities.

	All the best, 

	Omar

	----- Original Message ----- 

	From: George Kent <mailto:kent at hawaii.edu> 
	To: Doran, Dr Rodger (VTN) <mailto:doranr at vtn.wpro.who.int> 
	Cc: radix at ecie.org ; JC Gaillard <mailto:Jean-Christophe.gaillard at ujf-grenoble.fr> 
	Sent: Friday, February 02, 2007 6:24 AM
	Subject: Re: [POSSIBLE SPAM] - [Radix] Re: Contents of Radix digest, Vol 58,Issue 1 - Email found in subject

	Rodger poses good questions here. I agree that in many circumstances it is not useful to press for consensus on definitions. In real life, we manage very well without having the same technical definitions for things. 

	However, Rodger recognizes that in some circumstances it is necessary to be plain about working definitions, even if they don't meet everyone's wishes for how terms should be defined. We sometimes need working definitions. For example, if we are going to count disasters, disaster deaths, and the like, we have to know what we are trying to count.

	In some circumstances, definitions matter a lot. In criminal justice work, for example, crimes need to be well defined. 

	In an email I sent to this list on January 25, I pointed out that under the ISDR terminology, disaster is defined in terms of disruption. This implies that chronic conditions, such as steady high levels of disease or death in a community, should not get the attention of disaster specialists. 

	I have been trying to figure out ways to make acute crises somehow comparable with chronic ones. Under the ISDR definition, the key concept is a disruption in time. Maybe we can think of the chronic crises as comparable discontinuities in space? A place in which mortality rates are suddenly elevated is an acute disaster. Why not say a place in which mortality rates are unusually high, compared to other places, also is a disaster, but perhaps of another type. For example, it might make sense to say that any geographical space in which child mortality rates are above x is a disaster area.

	I am now in Geneva, having come here to serve on the Advisory Board for World Disasters Report 2007. One of my bits of advice was that they should define the term. How else would they know what to include and exclude in their coverage? And how else would the reader know what to expect?

	Maybe it would be useful to modify the ISDR terminology to accommodate both acute and chronic disasters, referring to different sorts of disruptions? Maybe it would be useful to have a future issue of World Disasters Report that focuses on chronic disasters?

	Aloha, George

	On Jan 31, 2007, at 12:51 AM, Doran, Dr Rodger (VTN) wrote:

	Dear all

	I have never really understood why we need to use the word "disaster" at all. Henry Quarantelli told me many years ago that there will never be consensus on the 

	________________________________

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	Message: 2
	Date: Sat, 03 Feb 2007 13:10:28 -0500
	From: "Omar D. Cardona A. BOG" <ocardona at uniandes.edu.co>
	Subject: Re: [POSSIBLE SPAM] - Re: [POSSIBLE SPAM] - [Radix] Re:
	Contents of Radix digest, Vol 58, Issue 1 - Email found in subject -
	Email found in subject
	To: "Doran, Dr Rodger (VTN)" <doranr at vtn.wpro.who.int>, George Kent
	<kent at hawaii.edu>
	Cc: radix at ecie.org, JC Gaillard
	<Jean-Christophe.gaillard at ujf-grenoble.fr>
	Message-ID: <009e01c747be$966861d0$1101a8c0 at rmee.upc.es>
	Content-Type: text/plain; charset="iso-8859-1"

	Dear Rodger,

	Thanks for your descriptions and your experience wth "communities". Your cases are particularly interesting. 

	Discussing about indicators and demostration of the effectiveness of risk reduction I would like to share with you and others of Radix the results of the program of indicators for the Americas (First phase). They have been developed and applied to fourteen countries at present. The reports are available in: http://idea.unalmzl.edu.co <http://idea.unalmzl.edu.co/>  There is a version of the reports in English although the main reports were in Spanish. Although the indicators have been applied to national level, some pilot applications have been at subnational level (as a demostration in other scales, departments of Colombia, and in Bogota city). Now we are in the process to start the second phase, related to the dialogues in the countries using the results of the indicators.

	I understand the difficulties of disaster risk reduction in at grass-root level but we have interesting cases of lab cities (as Manizales city in Colombia) where the risk management in all dimentions have been a reality with several stakeholders from the local goverment, private sector to community (groups of civil society and NGOs). In that city many of the theoretical approaches of risk management are indeed at present interesting good practices.

	All the best, Omar 
	----- Original Message ----- 
	From: Doran, Dr Rodger (VTN) 
	To: Omar D. Cardona A. BOG ; George Kent 
	Cc: JC Gaillard ; radix at ecie.org 
	Sent: Saturday, February 03, 2007 3:12 AM
	Subject: RE: [POSSIBLE SPAM] - Re: [POSSIBLE SPAM] - [Radix] Re: Contents of Radix digest,Vol 58,Issue 1 - Email found in subject - Email found in subject

	Hi Omar - I do a similar exercise for out courses - I ask the participants the take 6 coloured cards and work alone to write : 3 disasters, then 3 hazards, then 3 emergencies, then 3 risks, then 3 vulnerabilities and then after in the session, the name of the community that they belong to. Then I ask them to work in groups to reconcile their lists and come up with a final group effort, which they then defend in debate against the other groups, fllowed by a wrap up session. It takes quite a lot of time but is really worth it in longer courses. The advantage is that they have an opportunity to debate the difficulties that they have in reaching consensus on terms, rather than be just passive (and disintrested) recipients of the terms in my PowerPoint that closes the session. I am contantly amazed by how difficult everyone finds the first part of the exercise (these are people who have worked in disasters for years) and how lively and passionate the debate is in the second pa!
	rt. Also interesting is how much trouble thay have in defining their own personal community, even though they readily nominate "community" as the principle beneficiary of eveything they do (clearly without having thought much about what a community might be).

	One area of difficulty we have is that I work in a region where there is no common regional language. Each country has its own language and English is a (usually weak) second or even third language. Few languages here distinguish between these words very closely. These concepts expressed in english can be very subtle and I am often unsure if they are really understood. All I can hope to do is help people understand the terms when they read them in english, and reccommend that their national committies work on developing lexicons in their own language.

	Conceptual frameworks are important and very necessary. But we need to know is disaster risk reduction achievable? is what we do effective? are we making a difference? are investments in risk reduction/mitigation/preparedness making a return? to answer these questions we need indicators that measure specific areas of the concept. I feel uncomfortable lobbying for more investment in my own area of interest when I know I can't hope to support my case in the way that my other colleagues in public health can for their areas. My vision of the future is solid evidence based strategies for disaster risk reduction that I can defend robustly in the court of epidemiology. The World Disaster Report does not yet do help me do that. I download the raw data for the report every year and then have to spend a good few hours "cleaning" it to get rid of the errors - not the numbers, but typos/spelling mistakes (india and indai), words ending with a space (in a database, india[space] is a di!
	fferent country from india), compatibility errors (eg countries allocated to different regions in different years, changed column order etc). (Knowing these errors are there makes me very wary of using other peoples interpretations of this data).

	But we can't hope to get countries to improve their data collection when we can't tell them what to measure and how to do it. But if we dont have the data,will we ever know if all we are doing is actually making adifference?

	Rodger

	------------------------------------------------------------------------------
	From: radix-bounces at ecie.org on behalf of Omar D. Cardona A. BOG
	Sent: Fri 02/02/2007 20:55
	To: George Kent; Doran, Dr Rodger (VTN)
	Cc: JC Gaillard; radix at ecie.org
	Subject: [POSSIBLE SPAM] - Re: [POSSIBLE SPAM] - [Radix] Re: Contents of Radix digest,Vol 58,Issue 1 - Email found in subject - Email found in subject

	When I start the course on integrated disaster risk managment in the university I always request to all of my students a definition of disaster in the first day... because one would supose they should know why they decide to study that course... In the end of the course I made the question again to all... it is very interesting how their definition change. 

	My reflection is that the conceptual framework for the understanding a problem certainly is essential to solve it. Differences in the meaning of disaster or risk may impede successful, efficient and effective reduction. For example, if we accept that disaster implies loss and damage and consequential impacts that the affected community is unable to absorb or to cushion the effects and recover using its own resources and reserves. This suggests that there are levels and types of loss and damage that do not signify disaster for society. Then, disaster is a given situation, a product that is tangible and measurable. In addition, disaster supposes the prior existence of determined risk conditions. That is to say, disaster is the materialization of pre-existing risk. This perspective is a step for a better understanding of the problem and it has relevant implications in the way how we face the problem; however for many persons disaster and risk are the same... and there are !
	not reflexions about the difference of ex ante and ex post actions... 

	The concepts of disaster and risk are certainly relative, normative and they depends of scale, context, volume, time, or for who they exist, etc. but they are key concepts any way for reduction or management. In some cases, the purpose of terms is not only to have an accurate definition but to contribute to decision-making. It means that the underlaying concept is "control" and not only to reveal the "truth"... For example, the problem in our case is not if an event is an accident, emergency, disaster, catastrophe, and other terms (discution posed by Quarantelli) the problem is the "implications" of the event and "for who", and therefore the type of "response" and "dicision-making".

	Lastly, after the program of indicators on disaster risk and risk management for the Americas, suported by the IADB, we agree to have a terminology and a conceptual framework and then we decided to have a "long" definition (explanation) for disaster....

	DISASTER: A social process triggered by a natural, socio-natural or humanly induced phenomenon which, due to vulnerability conditions in the population, infrastructure and economic systems, causes intense, serious and extended alterations in the normal functioning of the affected country, region, zone or community to the extent that these are unable to autonomously respond to and resolve the problems using their own resources. The alterations may be diverse and differentiated, including the loss of life, health problems amongst the population, damage, loss or destruction of collective and individual goods and damage to the environment. These require immediate response by the goverment and the population in order to attend to the needs of the affected population and restore acceptable levels of well-being and life opportunities.

	All the best, 

	Omar

	----- Original Message ----- 

	From: George Kent 
	To: Doran, Dr Rodger (VTN) 
	Cc: radix at ecie.org ; JC Gaillard 
	Sent: Friday, February 02, 2007 6:24 AM
	Subject: Re: [POSSIBLE SPAM] - [Radix] Re: Contents of Radix digest, Vol 58,Issue 1 - Email found in subject

	Rodger poses good questions here. I agree that in many circumstances it is not useful to press for consensus on definitions. In real life, we manage very well without having the same technical definitions for things. 

	However, Rodger recognizes that in some circumstances it is necessary to be plain about working definitions, even if they don't meet everyone's wishes for how terms should be defined. We sometimes need working definitions. For example, if we are going to count disasters, disaster deaths, and the like, we have to know what we are trying to count.

	In some circumstances, definitions matter a lot. In criminal justice work, for example, crimes need to be well defined. 

	In an email I sent to this list on January 25, I pointed out that under the ISDR terminology, disaster is defined in terms of disruption. This implies that chronic conditions, such as steady high levels of disease or death in a community, should not get the attention of disaster specialists. 

	I have been trying to figure out ways to make acute crises somehow comparable with chronic ones. Under the ISDR definition, the key concept is a disruption in time. Maybe we can think of the chronic crises as comparable discontinuities in space? A place in which mortality rates are suddenly elevated is an acute disaster. Why not say a place in which mortality rates are unusually high, compared to other places, also is a disaster, but perhaps of another type. For example, it might make sense to say that any geographical space in which child mortality rates are above x is a disaster area.

	I am now in Geneva, having come here to serve on the Advisory Board for World Disasters Report 2007. One of my bits of advice was that they should define the term. How else would they know what to include and exclude in their coverage? And how else would the reader know what to expect?

	Maybe it would be useful to modify the ISDR terminology to accommodate both acute and chronic disasters, referring to different sorts of disruptions? Maybe it would be useful to have a future issue of World Disasters Report that focuses on chronic disasters?

	Aloha, George

	On Jan 31, 2007, at 12:51 AM, Doran, Dr Rodger (VTN) wrote:

	Dear all

	I have never really understood why we need to use the word "disaster" at all. Henry Quarantelli told me many years ago that there will never be consensus on the 

	----------------------------------------------------------------------------

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