Geography Reference
In-Depth Information
floods. At a more local level various environmental restoration trends range from
creating storm ponds and water-gardens, to grassing or using permeable paving in
parking areas or even roads, as described in Chap. 4. They help store more water
temporarily, or allow more water to percolate into the ground so as to reduce the run-
off that has been accelerated by the paving in so many urbanized areas.
9.7.4
Human Requirements in Risk Reduction
9741
Culture of Safety
In human terms the pressing need to reduce the dangers from natural hazards is
to find ways of creating a new culture of safety in urban places by improving the
level of human resiliency in five main areas, namely: identifying risk and estab-
lishing priorities, building more focused organizations and institutions, increasing
connectivity and communication, better education and training to combat risks, and
finding ways of ensuring that new budgeting procedures will enable a better financ-
ing of new policies. Again, few urban places are able to carry out all the necessary
changes by themselves, so higher levels of government, with more taxing powers
and resources, are needed to be part of the process. Given the changing nature and
varied incidence of many natural hazards these risk reduction policies have to be
flexible to respond to new conditions and must be frequently reviewed to maintain
a state of readiness, especially as new information about the utility of newer best
practices become available.
An important requirement is the need to create the
political will
to identify and
address the problems posed by natural hazards and convince the general public
and all stakeholders—whether in existing political forums, as well as private and
voluntary organizations—of the importance of actions to deal with the potential
problems. All the levels of preparedness described earlier must be improved if they
are not adequate. Since time and resources are needed to solve the problems, there
is a need to priorize risk reduction actions, not simply within cities but by national
agencies to focus attention on what can affect large areas. Unfortunately, the epi-
sodic nature of most disasters means that most politicians ignore or marginalize
the threats posed by natural hazards, since their term of office is often short and
dominated by day-to-day social and economic issues. Similarly, government de-
partments are inevitably concerned with their own short term problems, not ad-
ditional ones that are seen to be only in the realm of possibility. The result is that
the potential risks from episodic natural hazards have usually been side-lined in the
political agenda. For example, Healey and Malhotra (
2009
) reviewed voting pat-
terns and natural disasters in the USA and showed that although voters rewarded
presidents that responded quickly, and with financial aid to natural disasters with
more votes in the next election, those who spent money on disaster preparedness
did not receive any discernible increase in votes. Such inconsistencies in what is de-
scribed as the degree of 'citizen competence' lead to the inertia of many politicians
and public officials. This is unfortunate, since the authors show that $ 1 invested in
