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VULNERABLE PEOPLE AND FLOOD RISK MANAGEMENT POLICIES
Abstract
The main goal of this study is to evaluate the measures for vulnerable people in Disaster Risk Management (DRM) policies focusing on floods. There are many groups of potentially vulnerable people (e.g., older adults, people with disabilities, people living in poverty) whose characteristics are not accounted for in emergency plans; vulnerable people require more attention if they are to experience an equal disaster risk level.
The original contributions of this study are as follows: a proposal of definitions for vulnerable people and groups of potentially vulnerable people; a theoretical framework with indicators focusing on six groups of vulnerable people; an overview of the potentially vulnerable people for flood hazards in the Netherlands, Japan, and the United States; and a metric designed to evaluate DRM policies, from national to subnational and regional levels.
The results reveal that the top 10 indicators account for 80% of all (gross sum of) potentially vulnerable people, 7 of which are identical. These top 10 indicators can serve as a starting point in order to increase the resilience of the vulnerable population. These 3 countries can learn from each other’s measures regarding the 7 identical indicators, and possibly apply them in their own area. The metric shows that DRM laws rarely anticipate a future increase in the number of potentially vulnerable people, and none of the laws were created by involvement of potentially vulnerable people. We count on our governments to make equitable policies, but this has clearly not yet been established in these developed, democratic countries.
Keywords: Disaster Risk Management, disaster law, vulnerable people, social vulnerability, flood, evacuation
... According to Vink, (2014) adult vulnerability is mostly understood in the context of their health conditions and social networks. This is because older adults are more likely to have impaired physical mobility, diminished sensory awareness, and chronic diseases, which, when combined with a lower income, can make it difficult to take appropriate action throughout the flood disaster management cycle. ...
... This is because older adults are more likely to have impaired physical mobility, diminished sensory awareness, and chronic diseases, which, when combined with a lower income, can make it difficult to take appropriate action throughout the flood disaster management cycle. This is due to the fact that older adults frequently have difficulty receiving disaster information and warning signals; second, older adults are known to be less likely to comply with suggestions or orders issued by local governments for evacuation; this means that they frequently do not leave their homes due to psychological, medical, or economic conditions; however, their compliance with evacuation orders has not yet been generalized (Vink, 2014). ...
Despite a long developmental history of water-related disaster risk indicators, there is still no consensus or reliable system for selecting objective data, no methodological system for choosing and verifying the relevancy of water-related disaster risk indicators, and no linking results back to root causes or addressing possible impacts on policies or actors to instigate change.
Global policy documents such as the Sendai Framework for Disaster Risk Reduction (DRR) 2015–2013 [1] emphasize the urgent need for indicators capable of measuring risk reduction. However, developing and determining risk indicators faces many issues. Most disaster risk indices published do not yet include a basic overview of what data was used and how it was collected, let alone provide a systematic explanation of why each indicator was included, and why others were not. This consequently complicates linking the findings to their potential policy impacts. It also complicates the providing of clear-cut recommendations for improving resilience, which is a common intent of disaster risk indices.
This study, which focuses on water-related hazards, aims to provide disaster managers with a set of criteria for evaluating existing datasets used in disaster risk indices, index construction methods, and the links back to policy impacts. So far, there has been no comprehensive overview of indicator requirements or scoring systems. Previous studies concerning indicator evaluating metrics [2] have fewer metrics and have not yet addressed the different tiers of requirements, namely objective indicator data quality, methodological/epistemological aspects of index composition, and, most importantly, policy and actors of change (impact requirements). Further testing of these metrics in local studies can lead to the greatly needed scientific justification for indicator selection and can enhance index robustness.
The results aid in developing an evaluation system to address issues of data availability and the comparability of commonly used indicator sources, such as the World Bank. Once indicators can be scientifically linked to impacts through policy devices, national governments or other actors can become more likely to claim ownership of the data management of indicators. Future studies should expand this evaluation system to other natural hazards and focus on investigating the links between indicators and DRR in order to further validate indicator selection robustly.
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