Geography Reference
In-Depth Information
hazard event. For example, the Barcelona Resilience Board contains representatives
of 37 different organizations, from utilities to various levels of government and in-
dustries. But recourse should not only be made to governments, utilities, security
and medical organizations etc. Private companies should be made aware of the way
they will lose the ability to operate if the potential damages from natural hazards are
not anticipated and contained. So they are increasingly encouraged to help, not sim-
ply by senior personnel joining risk management committees, but through financial
contributions to infrastructure improvements, as well as by seconding specialists or
materials to assist with planning for resiliency or for post-disaster relief operations.
Responses to major disasters frequently require more than national level assis-
tance. International links are increasingly important. This is not simply to draw on
outside resources in times of crisis, but also to obtain information from other urban
places that have suffered from similar hazards, so that a local government can draw
upon the experience of others, especially about what pro-active policies are the
most successful. Traditional aid agencies like Oxfam and various United Nations
agencies have realised they should do more than just provide relief
after
a disaster;
they have become
pro-active
in providing topics and organizing conferences about
risk assessment and mitigation, giving advice to local governments at risk about
the best practices to reduce the scale of disasters. In addition, increasing numbers
of city-to-city resilience networks have grown up. One example is the International
Network for Designing Earthquake Resistant Cities (INDERC) whose members
share information about earthquake issues and design practices (Guevara-Perez
2012
) Another is an earthquake forecasting group (GNFE). Also, some cities in the
developed world have set up partnerships with centres in poorer countries to share
ideas, and specialists to help reduce the dangers from natural hazards. For example,
Bonn in Germany, perhaps because of its experience of being devastated in 1993,
1995 and 2005, when the Rhine rose above the city's 10 m flood protections, has
developed partnerships with several cities to help them cope with natural disasters,
namely: Bukhara (Uzbekistan), Cape Coast (Ghana), La Paz (Bolivia), Minsk (Be-
larus), Ulaanbaatar (Mongolia) and Chengdu (China). It is also home of the United
Nations International Strategy for Disaster Reduction Platform for Promotion of
Early Warnings (UNISDR-PPEW).
Adoption of such integrated approaches means there is usually a need to resolve
potential conflicts
that can occur between different groups and participants who
have different values and ways of operating. The interviews carried out by Reimer
(
2012
) and his colleagues in Canadian communities affected by fires has shown the
difficulties that arise between the risk mitigation approaches adopted by what are
called bureaucratic, market-based, associative and community groups, all of which
have different ways of operating. Meetings between the various stakeholders before
a crisis can help resolve difficulties, such as by identifying problems that can hold
up progress, in order to maximize resources in a co-operative fashion. For example,
one of the key problems in the aftermath of the Haiti earthquake has been the way
in which it has proved difficult to persuade the large landowners to release land on
which to build houses for these displaced. The result is that many of the displaced
people still live in temporary tent villages, 5 years after the event, very much a
