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Document maintained by Dr.
Rodrigue
Last revision: 08/01/20
There are several terms that overlap in meaning quite a bit and can lead to confusion and unclear thinking.
HazardThe opposite of vulnerability would be resilience, the ability of an individual, household, community, region, or nation to withstand a disaster and rebuild their lives, livelihoods, and mental health.Hazard refers to a risky situation, the possibility of danger. Earthquake- proneness; living in the WUI; living on the hurricane coast; living on the floodplain.
Disaster
Disaster is the realization of a hazard, a turning of potential into actual damage and exposure. It refers to an event of such magnitude that it overwhelms local ability to respond to it and necessarily requires outside assistance. A traffic accident on the 405 is tragic, but handling its consequences is easily within the reach of local fire departments and their paramedics, local police or sheriffs, local hospitals, street cleanup, and, perhaps, the local coroner. A plane crash on the 405 would transcend local ability to cope and outside assistance would come from the State and Federal government and relief organizations. Some writers are distinguishing catastrophe from disastere to describe events that require global response and assistance, such as the Sumatra earthquake and tsunami, or something like an extraterrestrial impact.
Risk
Risk is a statistical concept: How likely is it that you will be exposed to the forces released during a disaster. It has to do with the event in question, distance from it and the distance-decay involved, how many steps are involved (earthquake → distance from epicenter → soil/rock below you → building you're in → where you are in the building → how you respond). It is a probabilistic quantification of exposure to a defined hazardous event.
Vulnerability
Vulnerability sounds like risk and is often conflated with it, but it has to do with a person's, household's, or social group's ability to learn of impending danger, to take effective steps to mitigate their exposure, and to recover from the damages and disruptions of a disaster through their own or through their command of social resources. This varies quite distinctly from statistical risk, falling differentially along many of the axes of our personal identities: class, age, gender, race/ethnicity, language, religion, sexuality, and disability. It is quite possible for some people to take on enormous risk but outsource their vulnerability, at least partially, to others through various social transfer mechanisms. These can include tax and insurance income flows.
Increasingly, it is recognized that simple rebuilding back towards "normal" might not be appropriate or enough: We don't want to put people right back into the hazardous conditions that heightened their vulnerability in the first place. Disaster is built into the human experience of space and environment and will recur. What is needed, therefore, is to incorporate that understanding and rebuild in a way that reduces vulnerability to the next disaster. This is the concept of sustainability. Sustainable recovery and reconstruction entails building in effective mitigations and preparation for the next disaster and ensuring that access to these mitigations and preparations is more equitable. It entails consideration of environmental processes, too, as human disruption of natural ecosystems and physical processes actively creates several kinds of hazard.
Document maintained by Dr.
Rodrigue
Last revision: 08/01/20