In many instances, heads of delegations were represented by Ambassadors. The Secretary General of... more In many instances, heads of delegations were represented by Ambassadors. The Secretary General of the United Nations did not participate but an opening address was delivered by video. A video presentation was also delivered by the U.S.A. Vice-President Gore. There were 235 delegations from United Nations member states (147), Intergovernmental Agencies (41) and other Non-Government Organizations (47) participated during the conference with approximately 1500 delegates. A further 2000 others registered. Delegations were made up of a mix of political, government official, non-government, academic and private sector representatives. Plenary Outcomes and Messages The Yokohama Strategy for a Safer World and the Yokohama Message (see Appendices I, II) were adopted as the main outcome of the Conference, and in the concluding session, the President requested that it be presented to the United Nations General Assembly. Recognition of the excellent work of the IDNDR Secretariat and the Science and Technology Committee in organizing the conference was duly noted but very special thanks was delivered to the Japanese Government and the City of Yokohama for their warm hospitality and openness. Some delegations made concluding formal statements. African States were very vocal during the sessions, particularly emphasizing their dissatisfaction with the progress made so far on the objectives of the decade. Donor countries on the other hand were quieter during the overall proceedingsl Main Committee The public, private and non-government interface session had varied presentations from all three perspectives. The presentation on the role of non-government agencies was the most interesting from our perspective. There were two interesting messages. The Re-insurance Industry does not have the capacity any more to solely underwrite the cost of natural disasters. Before 1987, there was one disaster where costs exceeded $1Billion. Since then, there have been 13. Risk now must be distributed over four groups, the individuals, the primary insurer, the re-insurer and the government. This is a new role for the latter group. It was also noted,
To the Editor-Reliable, comparable data on climate-related disaster losses is essential to provid... more To the Editor-Reliable, comparable data on climate-related disaster losses is essential to provide the evidence base for identifying priorities for, and assessing progress with, climate-change adaptation and disaster risk reduction (DRR). This need has become urgent following recent global agreements on monitoring progress in DRR and assessing climate-change impacts through the 'loss and damage' mechanism 1. A single, global approach for both disaster data and climate-change impacts may seem desirable. In their Commentary, Cutter and Gall 2 offer a potential solution in the form of a good practice approach to collecting disaster data developed by the IRDR 3 (Integrated Research on Disaster Risk). The IRDR is one of a number of influential international groups active in the development of new approaches to disaster data, alongside the OECD 4 and a collaborative effort by the United Nations Development Program, Tohoku University and Fujitsu Ltd 5. Efforts to create new global standards also confront the fact that there are already many groups with well-established data and approaches to assessing disaster loss, such as EM-DAT 6 , DesInventar 7 , global reinsurers, the World Bank, and the Red Cross and Red Crescent, as well as national-level approaches. Given this reality, a single agreed approach seems a distant possibility.
This Working Group focuses on the economic recovery of businesses and economies from the COVID-19... more This Working Group focuses on the economic recovery of businesses and economies from the COVID-19 pandemic. With communities around the world experiencing severe economic impacts, we anticipate a proliferation of efforts to track, assess, and explain local economic recovery. Our Working Group's efforts are focused on understanding how the knowledge base from other types of disasters – such as earthquakes, floods, and hurricanes – can provide key insights, methods, and cases to inform pandemic research. This bibliography has two primary aims. 1) With the anticipated growth in research of business and economic topics related to the pandemic, we wish to facilitate this effort by providing an annotated bibliography of key publications on business and economic recovery from disasters for researchers to have a baseline list of references for setting background on related research agendas. This annotated bibliography was created by our interdisciplinary and geographically diverse Worki...
The plight of people living on land subject to frequent and severe flooding constitutes the focus... more The plight of people living on land subject to frequent and severe flooding constitutes the focus of this study. Development in such areas is generally the result of historical necessity or accident, and protection by engineering works is often not feasible. However valid the original reasons for settlement, the areas are now characterised by low property values and deteriorating public utilities and housing stock.
This chapter discusses the role of urban planning and the complexity of governance settings in di... more This chapter discusses the role of urban planning and the complexity of governance settings in disaster recovery. Urban planning is understood and discussed here in terms of outcomes and processes, in parallel with disaster recovery assessments based on an index developed by United Nations Development Programme. While urban planning can be understood as a mechanism oriented towards achievement of collective outcomes, analysis of the index demonstrates that democratic participatory processes alone do not guarantee sound recovery outcomes. It is, however, argued that the involvement of various actors and stakeholders in planning processes is an important starting point to balancing of rights and responsibilities and the allocation of suitable roles and tasks in recovery and subsequent prevention. The inclusion of prevention approaches is of particular importance in disaster recovery as it can improve the tendency to use ad hoc allocation of roles and tasks by establishing long-range g...
Allocating scare resources for fire management strategies requires information on the extent of e... more Allocating scare resources for fire management strategies requires information on the extent of economic losses from bushfires and the efficiency of alternatives. Despite the severity of bushfires, there is no agreed approach in Australia for estimating economic losses from fires nor for evaluating the economic efficiency of alternative suppression strategies. The poster proposes approaches to assess the economic effects of bushfires on local and state economies and sets out models to evaluate the economic efficiency of two key bushfire management strategies: presuppression and suppression. The first model arises from questions concerning the value of pre-suppression (before the fire) fuel reduction activities, and the estimation of an economically optimal fire management budget. The fuel reduction burning aims to reduce losses from a major fire event. To determine how the budget should be allocated, a modification of the Cost plus Net Value Change model is being used. This model ha...
Acknowledgements: This work was carried out with financial support from the Australian Government... more Acknowledgements: This work was carried out with financial support from the Australian Government (Department of Climate Change and Energy Efficiency) and the National Climate Change Adaptation Research Facility (NCCARF). The Victorian Centre for Climate Change Adaptation Research is thanked for in-kind support of Celeste Young and for knowledge exchange. The role of NCCARF is to lead the research community in a national interdisciplinary effort to generate the information needed by decisionmakers in government, business and in vulnerable sectors and communities to manage the risk of climate change impacts.
Major disasters challenge or exceed the capacity of the official emergency management sector to p... more Major disasters challenge or exceed the capacity of the official emergency management sector to provide needed rescue services, support and relief. Emergency services in most jurisdictions do not have the surge capacity for unusual or extreme events without drawing on other jurisdictions or local people from outside the formal emergency management organisations. In such circumstances, those in the affected area need to organise themselves and make maximum use of local resources to cope with the immediate aftermath of impact. To find the required surge capacity, this suggests a whole of society response with the official system working with the capacities of people, commerce and organisations outside the emergency sector. An example is provided by the destruction of the northern Australian capital city of Darwin by Cyclone Tracy in December 1974. Informal volunteering and emergent leadership in Darwin and across Australia were critical to the immediate response and relief. Volunteering was widespread and worked well alongside official emergency management. With today's information and communication technologies and a strong national resilience narrative, we would expect to do at least as well. However, governments now exercise much more control over civil society. We examine the implications for surge capacity and adaptability.
Abstract The first framework to specifically integrate climate change adaption and disaster risk ... more Abstract The first framework to specifically integrate climate change adaption and disaster risk management was the Framework for Resilient Development in the Pacific. Despite the intense interest in integration and a very large literature on the topic, this Framework and its implementation has largely escaped the attention of commentators. This paper focuses on the experience of Vanuatu as a start in addressing this gap in the literature. Vanuatu is one of the countries most at risk from natural hazards. We show how Vanuatu is progressing the ideals of integration in practice, in its policy and legislation, its institutional arrangements, and the resourcing it is allocating to integrating disaster risk management and climate change adaptation. We conclude that, at the national and formal level, Vanuatu is progressing well in pragmatically implementing the ideals of integration and the Framework for Resilient Development in the Pacific. It stands as a practical example for others.
Journal of Telecommunications and the Digital Economy, 2020
Warning systems are relied on worldwide as part of disaster risk reduction. The traditional model... more Warning systems are relied on worldwide as part of disaster risk reduction. The traditional model of a government monopolistic system supplying warnings through a broadcast approach is now challenged by new media, mobile technologies and the accompanying expectations of individualised warnings to personal mobile devices. We examine this situation, and one novel approach – the use of an augmented signal from the next generation of Japanese positioning satellites – to providing individual warnings to personal devices wherever their owners are. We conclude that delivery to personal devices is feasible and already happening to some extent. Linking these new official systems with the multiple information flows of social media and crowdsourcing remains a major challenge.
The views expressed in this publication are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect t... more The views expressed in this publication are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views and policies of the Asian Development Bank (ADB) or its Board of Governors or the governments they represent. ADB does not guarantee the accuracy of the data included in this publication and accepts no responsibility for any consequence of their use. The mention of specific companies or products of manufacturers does not imply that they are endorsed or recommended by ADB in preference to others of a similar nature that are not mentioned. By making any designation of or reference to a particular territory or geographic area, or by using the term "country" in this document, ADB does not intend to make any judgments as to the legal or other status of any territory or area.
A limitation in disaster risk reduction research is the lack of comparative analysis between thos... more A limitation in disaster risk reduction research is the lack of comparative analysis between those who die and those who survive in the same event. This makes it difficult to determine factors that increase or decrease the risk of dying in a disaster. In this paper, we begin to address this research gap by using published data from the 2009 'Black Saturday' bushfires in Victoria, Australia. One set of data comes from a representative postal survey of those who survived the fires, and a second from data on the 172 civilian fatalities in the same fires. The aim is to examine what differences exist between those who died and those who survived the fires. Are there identifiable differences between the two groups, and if so, why might this beand what does this mean for fire policy and planning? Two major differences were found between the two groups. First, the demography differed between fatalities and survivors: disproportionately more older people (over 50s) died than younger people (under 18s); and men were much more likely to die than women. Second, the behaviour between the two groups differed: most survivors reported carrying out their intended actions, whereas most fatalities did not (or were unable to) carry out their intended actions; and, most fatalities sheltered, while very few survivors did so. There are caveats to this analysis as the datasets were not intended for comparative analysis of this sort. These differences hold important lessons for bushfire policy and planning. The analysis highlights the dangers of sheltering passively within a building or structure, emphasising the importance of communicating this particular bushfire safety message.
In many instances, heads of delegations were represented by Ambassadors. The Secretary General of... more In many instances, heads of delegations were represented by Ambassadors. The Secretary General of the United Nations did not participate but an opening address was delivered by video. A video presentation was also delivered by the U.S.A. Vice-President Gore. There were 235 delegations from United Nations member states (147), Intergovernmental Agencies (41) and other Non-Government Organizations (47) participated during the conference with approximately 1500 delegates. A further 2000 others registered. Delegations were made up of a mix of political, government official, non-government, academic and private sector representatives. Plenary Outcomes and Messages The Yokohama Strategy for a Safer World and the Yokohama Message (see Appendices I, II) were adopted as the main outcome of the Conference, and in the concluding session, the President requested that it be presented to the United Nations General Assembly. Recognition of the excellent work of the IDNDR Secretariat and the Science and Technology Committee in organizing the conference was duly noted but very special thanks was delivered to the Japanese Government and the City of Yokohama for their warm hospitality and openness. Some delegations made concluding formal statements. African States were very vocal during the sessions, particularly emphasizing their dissatisfaction with the progress made so far on the objectives of the decade. Donor countries on the other hand were quieter during the overall proceedingsl Main Committee The public, private and non-government interface session had varied presentations from all three perspectives. The presentation on the role of non-government agencies was the most interesting from our perspective. There were two interesting messages. The Re-insurance Industry does not have the capacity any more to solely underwrite the cost of natural disasters. Before 1987, there was one disaster where costs exceeded $1Billion. Since then, there have been 13. Risk now must be distributed over four groups, the individuals, the primary insurer, the re-insurer and the government. This is a new role for the latter group. It was also noted,
To the Editor-Reliable, comparable data on climate-related disaster losses is essential to provid... more To the Editor-Reliable, comparable data on climate-related disaster losses is essential to provide the evidence base for identifying priorities for, and assessing progress with, climate-change adaptation and disaster risk reduction (DRR). This need has become urgent following recent global agreements on monitoring progress in DRR and assessing climate-change impacts through the 'loss and damage' mechanism 1. A single, global approach for both disaster data and climate-change impacts may seem desirable. In their Commentary, Cutter and Gall 2 offer a potential solution in the form of a good practice approach to collecting disaster data developed by the IRDR 3 (Integrated Research on Disaster Risk). The IRDR is one of a number of influential international groups active in the development of new approaches to disaster data, alongside the OECD 4 and a collaborative effort by the United Nations Development Program, Tohoku University and Fujitsu Ltd 5. Efforts to create new global standards also confront the fact that there are already many groups with well-established data and approaches to assessing disaster loss, such as EM-DAT 6 , DesInventar 7 , global reinsurers, the World Bank, and the Red Cross and Red Crescent, as well as national-level approaches. Given this reality, a single agreed approach seems a distant possibility.
This Working Group focuses on the economic recovery of businesses and economies from the COVID-19... more This Working Group focuses on the economic recovery of businesses and economies from the COVID-19 pandemic. With communities around the world experiencing severe economic impacts, we anticipate a proliferation of efforts to track, assess, and explain local economic recovery. Our Working Group's efforts are focused on understanding how the knowledge base from other types of disasters – such as earthquakes, floods, and hurricanes – can provide key insights, methods, and cases to inform pandemic research. This bibliography has two primary aims. 1) With the anticipated growth in research of business and economic topics related to the pandemic, we wish to facilitate this effort by providing an annotated bibliography of key publications on business and economic recovery from disasters for researchers to have a baseline list of references for setting background on related research agendas. This annotated bibliography was created by our interdisciplinary and geographically diverse Worki...
The plight of people living on land subject to frequent and severe flooding constitutes the focus... more The plight of people living on land subject to frequent and severe flooding constitutes the focus of this study. Development in such areas is generally the result of historical necessity or accident, and protection by engineering works is often not feasible. However valid the original reasons for settlement, the areas are now characterised by low property values and deteriorating public utilities and housing stock.
This chapter discusses the role of urban planning and the complexity of governance settings in di... more This chapter discusses the role of urban planning and the complexity of governance settings in disaster recovery. Urban planning is understood and discussed here in terms of outcomes and processes, in parallel with disaster recovery assessments based on an index developed by United Nations Development Programme. While urban planning can be understood as a mechanism oriented towards achievement of collective outcomes, analysis of the index demonstrates that democratic participatory processes alone do not guarantee sound recovery outcomes. It is, however, argued that the involvement of various actors and stakeholders in planning processes is an important starting point to balancing of rights and responsibilities and the allocation of suitable roles and tasks in recovery and subsequent prevention. The inclusion of prevention approaches is of particular importance in disaster recovery as it can improve the tendency to use ad hoc allocation of roles and tasks by establishing long-range g...
Allocating scare resources for fire management strategies requires information on the extent of e... more Allocating scare resources for fire management strategies requires information on the extent of economic losses from bushfires and the efficiency of alternatives. Despite the severity of bushfires, there is no agreed approach in Australia for estimating economic losses from fires nor for evaluating the economic efficiency of alternative suppression strategies. The poster proposes approaches to assess the economic effects of bushfires on local and state economies and sets out models to evaluate the economic efficiency of two key bushfire management strategies: presuppression and suppression. The first model arises from questions concerning the value of pre-suppression (before the fire) fuel reduction activities, and the estimation of an economically optimal fire management budget. The fuel reduction burning aims to reduce losses from a major fire event. To determine how the budget should be allocated, a modification of the Cost plus Net Value Change model is being used. This model ha...
Acknowledgements: This work was carried out with financial support from the Australian Government... more Acknowledgements: This work was carried out with financial support from the Australian Government (Department of Climate Change and Energy Efficiency) and the National Climate Change Adaptation Research Facility (NCCARF). The Victorian Centre for Climate Change Adaptation Research is thanked for in-kind support of Celeste Young and for knowledge exchange. The role of NCCARF is to lead the research community in a national interdisciplinary effort to generate the information needed by decisionmakers in government, business and in vulnerable sectors and communities to manage the risk of climate change impacts.
Major disasters challenge or exceed the capacity of the official emergency management sector to p... more Major disasters challenge or exceed the capacity of the official emergency management sector to provide needed rescue services, support and relief. Emergency services in most jurisdictions do not have the surge capacity for unusual or extreme events without drawing on other jurisdictions or local people from outside the formal emergency management organisations. In such circumstances, those in the affected area need to organise themselves and make maximum use of local resources to cope with the immediate aftermath of impact. To find the required surge capacity, this suggests a whole of society response with the official system working with the capacities of people, commerce and organisations outside the emergency sector. An example is provided by the destruction of the northern Australian capital city of Darwin by Cyclone Tracy in December 1974. Informal volunteering and emergent leadership in Darwin and across Australia were critical to the immediate response and relief. Volunteering was widespread and worked well alongside official emergency management. With today's information and communication technologies and a strong national resilience narrative, we would expect to do at least as well. However, governments now exercise much more control over civil society. We examine the implications for surge capacity and adaptability.
Abstract The first framework to specifically integrate climate change adaption and disaster risk ... more Abstract The first framework to specifically integrate climate change adaption and disaster risk management was the Framework for Resilient Development in the Pacific. Despite the intense interest in integration and a very large literature on the topic, this Framework and its implementation has largely escaped the attention of commentators. This paper focuses on the experience of Vanuatu as a start in addressing this gap in the literature. Vanuatu is one of the countries most at risk from natural hazards. We show how Vanuatu is progressing the ideals of integration in practice, in its policy and legislation, its institutional arrangements, and the resourcing it is allocating to integrating disaster risk management and climate change adaptation. We conclude that, at the national and formal level, Vanuatu is progressing well in pragmatically implementing the ideals of integration and the Framework for Resilient Development in the Pacific. It stands as a practical example for others.
Journal of Telecommunications and the Digital Economy, 2020
Warning systems are relied on worldwide as part of disaster risk reduction. The traditional model... more Warning systems are relied on worldwide as part of disaster risk reduction. The traditional model of a government monopolistic system supplying warnings through a broadcast approach is now challenged by new media, mobile technologies and the accompanying expectations of individualised warnings to personal mobile devices. We examine this situation, and one novel approach – the use of an augmented signal from the next generation of Japanese positioning satellites – to providing individual warnings to personal devices wherever their owners are. We conclude that delivery to personal devices is feasible and already happening to some extent. Linking these new official systems with the multiple information flows of social media and crowdsourcing remains a major challenge.
The views expressed in this publication are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect t... more The views expressed in this publication are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views and policies of the Asian Development Bank (ADB) or its Board of Governors or the governments they represent. ADB does not guarantee the accuracy of the data included in this publication and accepts no responsibility for any consequence of their use. The mention of specific companies or products of manufacturers does not imply that they are endorsed or recommended by ADB in preference to others of a similar nature that are not mentioned. By making any designation of or reference to a particular territory or geographic area, or by using the term "country" in this document, ADB does not intend to make any judgments as to the legal or other status of any territory or area.
A limitation in disaster risk reduction research is the lack of comparative analysis between thos... more A limitation in disaster risk reduction research is the lack of comparative analysis between those who die and those who survive in the same event. This makes it difficult to determine factors that increase or decrease the risk of dying in a disaster. In this paper, we begin to address this research gap by using published data from the 2009 'Black Saturday' bushfires in Victoria, Australia. One set of data comes from a representative postal survey of those who survived the fires, and a second from data on the 172 civilian fatalities in the same fires. The aim is to examine what differences exist between those who died and those who survived the fires. Are there identifiable differences between the two groups, and if so, why might this beand what does this mean for fire policy and planning? Two major differences were found between the two groups. First, the demography differed between fatalities and survivors: disproportionately more older people (over 50s) died than younger people (under 18s); and men were much more likely to die than women. Second, the behaviour between the two groups differed: most survivors reported carrying out their intended actions, whereas most fatalities did not (or were unable to) carry out their intended actions; and, most fatalities sheltered, while very few survivors did so. There are caveats to this analysis as the datasets were not intended for comparative analysis of this sort. These differences hold important lessons for bushfire policy and planning. The analysis highlights the dangers of sheltering passively within a building or structure, emphasising the importance of communicating this particular bushfire safety message.
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Papers by John Handmer