Maureen Fordham

Northumbria University · Department of Geography

Background Mobile technology can deliver public health interventions to reach remote populations such as unique mHealth interventions aimed at low-literacy audiences in low resource settings. This research study assessed a mobile phone-based serious game that teaches geohazard, maternal, and neonatal health messages. This study is part of the Mater...

Purpose This conversation presents the reflections from five prominent disaster scholars and practitioners on the purpose of Radix – the Radical Disaster Interpretations network – as the authors celebrate its 20th anniversary. Design/methodology/approach This paper is based on the conversations that took place on Disasters: Deconstructed Podcast l...

Background Mobile technology is increasingly important for delivering public health interventions to remote populations. This research study developed, piloted, and assessed a serious game for mobile devices that teaches geohazard, maternal, and neonatal health messages. This unique mHealth intervention aimed at low-literacy audiences in low resour...

This article aims to understand local views and understandings of livelihood impacts of flash floods, and how to tackle the challenges. The work is completed through case studies of two villages in Cox's Bazar District in southeast Bangladesh, Manirjhil and Chotojamchori. Based in theoretical understandings from disaster research of how underlying...

Community resilience has become an important concept for characterising and measuring the abilities of populations to anticipate, absorb, accommodate, and recover from the effects of a hazardous event in a timely and efficient manner (Walker and Westley 2011; Almedom 2013; Berkes and Ross 2013; Deeming et al. 2014). This goes beyond a purely social...

Community resilience has become an important concept for characterising and measuring the abilities of populations to anticipate, absorb, accommodate, and recover from the effects of a hazardous event in a timely and efficient manner. Many conceptual and empirical studies have shown that communities are an important scale and setting for building r...

This chapter examines the underpinnings of the sustainable livelihoods approach (SLA), drawing out key criticisms and linkages between livelihoods thinking and resilience, and discusses opportunities for resilience to progress the livelihoods agenda, and vice versa. The 'sustainable livelihoods framework' was adopted by the Department for Internati...

This chapter discusses emBRACE case study research that was undertaken in Cumbria, a county in the north west of England. It explores the concept of community disaster resilience (CDR), as it was operationalised by a diverse population residing alongside a short, 47 km length of predominantly rural river catchment. Accordingly, the emBRACE typology...

Bangladesh is highly disaster-prone, with drought being a major hazard which significantly impacts water, food, health, livelihoods, and migration. In seeking to reduce drought vulnerabilities and impacts while improving responses, existing literature pays limited attention to community-level views and actions. This paper aims to contribute to fill...

Purpose of review: To identify strategies for communicating with youth and children pre- and post-disaster in the context of a broader survey of child participation in disaster risk reduction as well as methods for communication with children. Recent findings: Youth and children are capable of peer and community education and activism concerning...

Globally, a number of catastrophic hydrometeorological hazards occurred in 2017 among which the monsoon floods in South Asia was particularly disastrous, killing nearly 1200 people in India, Nepal and Bangladesh. The wetland region (Haor) of northeastern (NE) Bangladesh was severely affected by flash floods early in 2017, affecting nearly 1 million...

Purpose The purpose of this paper is to connect the theoretical idea of warning systems as social processes with empirical data of people’s perceptions of and actions for warning for cyclones in Bangladesh. Design/methodology/approach A case study approach is used in two villages of Khulna district in southwest Bangladesh: Kalabogi and Kamarkhola....

In the graphic design of serious games, player engagement is an important consideration. We propose a new approach towards aiding the graphic designer to consider the major factors relevant to player engagement. This article describes a method for creating effective graphical content for serious games that takes into account the impact of complex p...

North West Bangladesh is a harsh climatic and is experiencing drought conditions. This situation is only partly related to climate and environment but is also due to human made decision making. This study of two communities shows how they have adapted over time and made significant development advances (food security and child mortality) but with i...

The level of community is considered to be vital for building disaster resilience. Yet, community resilience as a scientific concept often remains vaguely defined and lacks the guiding characteristics necessary for analysing and enhancing resilience on the ground. The emBRACE framework of community resilience presented in this paper provides a heur...

The level of community is considered to be vital for building disaster resilience. Yet, community resilience as a scientific concept often remains vaguely defined and lacks the guiding characteristics necessary for analysing and enhancing resilience on the ground. The emBRACE framework of community resilience presented in this paper provides a heur...

UK and wider EU governments follow gender neutral policies in their disaster planning and management based upon a misconception that the gender gap has been eliminated. Findings from our quantitative and qualitative research, carried out as a part of an EU Project, ‘MICRODIS’, in two flood affected locations in England (Tewkesbury floods of 2007, a...

This article introduces a themed section of Gender, Place and Culture on ‘Sexual and Gender Minorities in Disaster’. This introduction frames the articles constituting the themed section, which together contribute important insights to the growing body of research, policy and practice on the experiences of sexual and gender minorities in disasters....

Purpose – Holistic approaches to public health such as “One Health” emphasize the interconnectedness between people, animals, ecosystems, and epidemic risk, and many advocate for this philosophy to be adopted within disaster risk management (DRM). Historically, animal and human diseases have been managed separately from each other, and apart from o...

Sen’s entitlement thesis rooted in social contract theory has been used to explain access to food, and is used by states to design social protection programs as transfer entitlements to diffuse food insecurities. Social protection programs have now burgeoned in several countries as a strategy to enable the poor to overcome risks, vulnerabilities an...

Increasingly, citizens are being asked to take a more active role in disaster risk reduction (DRR), as decentralization of hazard governance has shifted greater responsibility for hazard preparedness actions onto individuals. Simultaneously, the taxonomy of hazards considered for DRR has expanded to include medical and social crises alongside natur...

In the disasters literature, aftermath is used to denote the predominantly negative consequences of a hazard event. Yet in old English the same term is used to describe the green shoots that emerge from a grass field after it is cut. Applying this second, more positive and more resilience-relevant framing to hazard consequences, this paper focuses...

This chapter discusses the related concepts of resilience and adaptation. The discussion in the chapter emanates from the on-going EU FP7 emBRACE project which used five case studies across Europe to investigate the role, structure and processes of ‘ community resilience’ in the face of flooding, alpine hazards (avalanche and flash flood), heatwave...

While triggered by natural hazards, disasters are never “natural.” The term “natural disaster” is current, universally used, but highly loaded and misleading. Disaster risk is a result of hazard events interacting with people who are prepared or unprepared and who have access to the resources to reduce risk or are deprived of such resources.

With historical roots in the command and control approach of “civil defense,” disaster management (DM) has grown ever more “civilianized” as the old military model has evolved into one that engages citizens. In turn, DM has moved increasingly from dealing only with response to events and recovery to proactive attempts to prevent or at least reduce...

إدارة الكوارث هناك فجوة دائمة بين النظري والعملي، بين الأوساط الأكاديمية والمحترفين النشيطين في مجال إدارة الكوارث. تعني هذه الفجوة أنه لم يتم التعلم من الدروس القيِّمة ونتيجة لذلك فالناس يموتون أو يعانون من ذلك. يفتح هذا الكتاب حواراَ بين المجال النظري والمجال العملي. أنه يقدم دروساً حيوية للممارسين في العلوم والمعرفة عن المخاطر الطبيعية، وإدارة...

The severity of the impacts of extreme and non-extreme weather and climate events depends strongly on the level of vulnerability and exposure to these events (high confidence). [2.2.1, 2.3, 2.5] Trends in vulnerability and exposure are major drivers of changes in disaster risk, and of impacts when risk is realized (high confidence). [2.5] Understan...

Many climate change adaptation efforts aim to address the implications of potential changes in the frequency, intensity, and duration of weather and climate events that affect the risk of extreme impacts on human society. That risk is determined not only by the climate and weather events (the hazards) but also by the exposure and vulnerability to t...

Despite national and international policies to develop social capital in disaster-affected communities, empiric evidence on the association between social capital and disaster mental health is limited and ambiguous. The study explores the relationship between social capital and disaster mental health outcomes (PTSD, anxiety, and depression) in comb...

Background: Despite national and international policies to develop social capital in disaster-affected communities, empiric evidence on the association between social capital and disaster mental health is limited and ambiguous. Objective: The study explored the relationship between social capital and disaster mental health outcomes (PTSD, anxiety,...

The daily media is filled with images of catastrophic events which seem increasingly frequent and violent. In parallel there are a large range of scientific studies, debates in the policy arena, and a growing number of international institutions focused on disaster reduction. But a paradox remains that despite advances in technology, disasters cont...

Those concerned with disaster and development represent a diversity of interests including the academic/theoretical, the policy-related, the practitioner-oriented, and the political. This results in the generation of different theories and literatures, varied budgets, disparate organizational structures, and diverse constituencies and worldviews. P...

We have analysed the differences in infant mortality for 1981 to 1990 in areas of contrasting soil types in south-central England. The soils overlie rocks of varied lithology and hydrology, ranging from porous and permeable Chalk and limestones, to the generally wet and impermeable Oxford and Lower Jurassic Clays. The study area comprises 504 admin...

PIP People who experience disaster are widely regarded as an undifferentiated group of victims. In the immediate crisis period, it is hard for outside professionals to differentiate between varying levels of need and still carry out their pressing disaster-related tasks. However, soon after a disaster strikes, it becomes clear that some people were...

Those who experience disaster are widely regarded as an undifferentiated group, labeled "victims." In the immediate crisis period, it is difficult for professionals to differentiate, except crudely, between varying levels of need and still carry out urgent duties and responsibilities. However, it soon becomes apparent that some are hi...

The understanding of how people evaluate and respond to natural hazards in an urban area, and how this knowledge can be integrated in the planning and management process, are becoming very important elements of a comprehensive and participatory approach to flood hazard management. Such an approach demands a clear comprehension of the processes of t...

Gender awareness and sensitivity in disaster research and management remains uncommon and tends to focus on the developing rather than the developed world. This paper uses a feminist oral geography to present some findings about women’s experiences in two floods in Scotland. It is conceptualised around public and private (masculinised and feminised...

In January 1993 and December 1994, two areas of Scotland experienced intensive flooding and large-scale evacuation of a spontaneous and unstructured nature. Both the flooding and the evacuation left their traumatic mark on the households. The research reported here was qualitative, with the objective of investigating the evacuation pr...

The Environment Agency has accepted the need for public participation in decisions concerning river management in keeping with Agenda 21 concerns for environmental policies that command a good measure of public support. In the past, public participation has often relied upon consultations involving formal meetings with interest groups and local pol...

This paper presents results from the EUROflood research project sponsored by the European Commission under the EPOCH programme. The paper evaluates levels of development of flood forecasting, warning and response systems (FFWRS) in the European Union with reference to riverine and tidal floods in The Netherlands, the United Kingdom, Germany, France...

Discusses the results of evaluations of flood forecasting, warning and response systems in England, Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland. Reveals that in England and Wales flood warning systems often underperform. Despite technical sophistication and their elevation to high priority in central government's flood defence strategy, arrangements for f...

This paper describes the EUROFLOOD project, being sponsored by the European Commission under its EPOCH programme to investigate the nature and extent of flood hazards in Europe. The project is designed to develop data sets and computational systems within a number of project modules. These include developing regional scale computer programs for haz...

Four main groups are considered in relation to the risk from flooding: the engineers involved in the design of flood alleviation schemes, emergency planners, the public, including both the population at risk from flooding and the rest of the population who will bear all or most of the cost of flood alleviation schemes and the researchers, such as g...

Research carried out by the Flood Hazard Research Centre suggests that members of the public have particular preferences for the management of river environments. Research in study areas along the River Thames is currently examining people's preferences concerning proposed flood alleviation schemes that are likely to have a significant impact on th...

percent of those living below the poverty line are women 3 for whom climate change represents very specific threats to security. When the impacts of climate change are brought home, then women, in their roles as the primary managers of family, food, water and health, must deal very directly with the impacts. While natural climate variations have ex...

This Spring 2009 issue of the Regional Development Dialogue (RDD) presents examples of, and gaps in, gendered disaster risk reduction (DRR) initiatives and issues from around the world. The articles illustrate the intrinsic relationship between disaster and develop- ment: more specifically, between DRR and sustainable development. They further un-...