Risk Management/Disaster Management

A disaster is a serious disruption, occurring over a relatively short time, of the functioning of a community or a society involving widespread human, material, economic or environmental loss and impacts, which exceeds the ability of the affected community or society to cope using its own resources.[1]

Ruins from the 1906 San Francisco earthquake, remembered as one of the worst natural disasters in the history of the United States.

In contemporary academia, disasters are seen as the consequence of inappropriately managed risk. These risks are the product of a combination of both hazards and vulnerability. Hazards that strike in areas with low vulnerability will never become disasters, as in the case of uninhabited regions.[2]

Developing countries suffer the greatest costs when a disaster hits – more than 95 percent of all deaths caused by hazards occur in developing countries, and losses due to natural hazards are 20 times greater (as a percentage of GDP) in developing countries than in industrialized countries.[3][4]

Etymology

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The word disaster is derived from Middle French désastre and that from Old Italian disastro, which in turn comes from the Ancient Greek pejorative prefix δυσ-, (dus-) "bad"[5] and ἀστήρ (aster), "star".[6] The root of the word disaster ("bad star" in Greek) comes from an astrological sense of a calamity blamed on the position of planets.[7]

Learning Task

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References

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  1. Staff. "What is a disaster?". www.ifrc.org. International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies. Retrieved 21 June 2017.
  2. Quarantelli E.L. (editor) "Where We Have Been and Where We Might Go", What is a Disaster?: A Dozen Perspectives on the Question, London, Routledge, 1 edition 1998, pp.146-159
  3. "World Bank: Disaster Risk Management".
  4. Luis Flores Ballesteros. "Who’s getting the worst of natural disasters?" 54Pesos.org, 4 October 2008
  5. "Dus, Henry George Liddell, Robert Scott, "A Greek-English Lexicon", at Perseus".
  6. "Aster, Henry George Liddell, Robert Scott, "A Greek-English Lexicon", at Perseus".
  7. "Disaster" in Etymology online