Midterm Study Guide

Please review the following concepts and definitions, referring to lectures and readings (or an online search!):

• Social Science and Disaster

  • difference between morbidity and mortality

  • why is loss to hazard increasing?

  • risk mitigation and its sometimes perverse relationship with risk exacerbation

  • the disaster cycle: risk management vs. emergency management

  • common ways media frame a disaster story

  • why is sensationalism so prevalent in media?

  • what is fake news? is it really a completely new phenomenon?

  • why might intense ownership concentration in major media create faulty coverage of a disaster?

  • disaster cascades

  • multi-layer single-hazard vs. multi-hazard approaches to hazard networks and disaster cascades

  • Type I/Type II errors in decision-making

  • risk assessment and risk management: their definitions and relationships

  • quirks of human risk perception

  • risk communication and public education

  • de minimis and precautionary principles

  • nuances in the comparative definitions of "hazard," "risk," "disaster"

  • nuances in the concepts of "risk" versus "vulnerability"

  • the kinds of hazards likeliest to be amplified (and attenuated) in public concern

  • probability and risk estimates (multiplication of probabilities when different hazards intersect; addition of probabilities when they're unrelated but may coïncide)

  • cognitive dissonance/dissonant perception

  • adverse selection and moral hazard in insurance

  • disaster recovery sequence of activities and the controversy over the mathematical relationships of each phase

  • compare and contrast mitigation and preparation

  • forecasts, warnings, predictions

  • differences between developed countries and developing countries in the kinds of losses a disaster causes

  • development aid/sustainable development and disaster aid/humanitarian assistance

  • sustainability, community resilience, and natural hazards and disasters

  • social and spatial patterns in vulnerability: how might race, language, gender, religion, age, income play out in risk and vulnerability?

  • donor fatigue

  • disaster by management

  • "cherry-picking"

  • why is "first-responder" a bit of a misnomer?

  • distinctions among risk assessment, emergency management, and disaster planning: who does each, what are their aims, how do they overlap and interact?

  • zoning as a tool for risk mitigation: how does it work? what sorts of obstacles prevent its wider application?

  • normalization of anomaly

  • managerialism

  • stovepiping

• Wildfire hazard in California

  • What is a Mediterranean climate, and where can it be found on Earth?

  • How do plants cope with the summer drought?

  • The relationship of Mediterranean scrub (chaparral, California sage scrub locally; maquis and garrigue in the Mediterranean; mallee in Australia) with fire

  • As time since the last fire increases, what happens both to the probability and the magnitude of the next one?

  • The points of disagreement between Richard Minnich and Jon Keeley in discussing chaparral fire hazard. Be able to summarize each camp's central arguments -- and the wildfire hazard management strategies each implies.

  • On what sort of policy recommendation could both the Minnich and the Keeley camps agree?

  • How do the geographies of risk exposure to wildfire hazard in coastal California and of societal vulnerability to it differ?

  • What happened to Mike Davis when he started popularizing the social inequities in chaparral/CSS wildfire hazard?

  • How can individual households with the resources and desire to live in pyrogenic vegetation do to mitigate their personal risk ... and reduce the "negative externalities" that risk means for the rest of society? What sorts of structural and non-structural mitigations are available at the individual and household scale? What about at the community scale?

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Last revision: 10/01/23