What is DRRM? BY MIKE MANALO
DRRM (Disaster Risk Reduction Management)
Disaster Risk Reduction Management (DRRM) aims to reduce the damage caused by natural hazards like earthquakes, floods, droughts and cyclones, through an ethic of prevention of risk.
There is no such thing as “natural” Disaster, only natural hazards.
Disasters often follow natural hazards. A disaster's severity depends on how much impact a hazard has on society and the environment. The scale of the impact in turn depends on the choices we make for our lives and for our environment. These choices relate to how we grow our food, where and how we build our homes, what kind of government we have, how our financial system works and even what we teach in schools. Each decision and action makes us more vulnerable to disasters - or more resilient to them.
Disaster Risk Reduction Management is about choices.
Disaster risk reduction is the concept and practice of reducing disaster risks through systematic efforts to analyze and reduce the causal factors of disasters.
Reducing exposure to hazards, lessening vulnerability of people and property, wise management of land and the environment, and improving preparedness and early warning for adverse events are all examples of disaster risk reduction.
Disaster Risk Reduction Management is everyone’s business
Disaster risk reduction includes disciplines like disaster management, disaster mitigation and disaster preparedness, but DRR is also part of sustainable development. In order for development activities to be sustainable they must also reduce disaster risk.
Importance of DRRM
From a development perspective, therefore, disaster risk reduction is vital for building a more equitable and sustainable future. Making investments in prevention and preparedness, including through civil defense exercises, is a necessary part of systematic efforts to increase resilience to disaster.
Five (5) priorities identified for action.
1) To ensure that disaster risk reduction is a national and a local priority.
2) To identify, assess, and monitor disaster risks and enhance early warning systems.
3) To use knowledge, innovation, and education to build a culture of safety and resilience at all levels.
4) To reduce the underlying risk factors. and
5) To strengthen disaster preparedness for effective response and recovery at all levels, from the local to the national.
How do we reduce risk?
There are activities that DRRM involves that is related.
Prevention
Activities and measures to avoid existing and new disaster risks (often less costly than disaster relief and response). For instance, relocating exposed people and assets away from a hazard area.
Mitigation
The lessening or limitation of the adverse impacts of hazards and related disasters. For instance, constructing flood defenses, planting trees to stabilize slopes and implementing strict land use and building construction codes.
Transfer
The process of formally or informally shifting the financial consequences of particular risks from one party to another whereby a household, community, enterprise or state authority will obtain resources from the other party after a disaster occurs, in exchange for ongoing or compensatory social or financial benefits provided to that other party.
Preparedness
The knowledge and capacities of governments, professional response and recovery organizations, communities and individuals to effectively anticipate, respond to, and recover from the impacts of likely, imminent or current hazard events or conditions. For instance, installing early warning systems, identifying evacuation routes and preparing emergency supplies.
Identifying and Understanding risk
Awareness, identification, understanding and measurement of disaster risks are all clearly fundamental underpinnings of disaster risk management (UNISDR, 2015b). Disaster risk reduction is about decisions and choices, including a lack of, so risk information has a role in five key areas of decision making:
Five key areas of decision making
Risk Identification
Financial Protection
Risk reduction
Resilient reconstruction
Preparedness
Risk Identification
Because the damages and losses caused by historical disasters are often not widely known, and because the potential damages and losses that could arise from future disasters (including infrequent but high-impact events) may not be known at all, DRM is given a low priority. Appropriate communication of robust risk information at the right time can raise awareness and trigger action.
Financial protection
Disaster risk analysis was born out of the financial and insurance sector’s need to quantify the risk of comparatively rare high-impact natural hazard events. As governments increasingly seek to manage their sovereign financial risk or programs that manage individual financial risks (e.g., micro-insurance or household earthquake insurance).
Risk Reduction
Hazard and risk information may be used to inform a broad range of activities to reduce risk, from improving building codes and deg risk reduction measures (such as flood and storm surge protection), to carrying out macro-level assessments of the risks to different types of buildings (for prioritizing investment in reconstruction and retrofitting, for example).
Resilient reconstruction
Risk assessment can play a critical role in impact modelling before an event strikes (in the days leading up to a cyclone, for example), or it can provide initial and rapid estimates of human, physical, and economic loss in an event’s immediate aftermath. Moreover, risk information for resilient reconstruction needs to be available before an event occurs, since after the event there is rarely time to collect the information needed to inform resilient design and land-use plans.
Preparedness
An understanding of the geographic area affected, along with the intensity and frequency of different hazard events, is critical for planning evacuation routes, creating shelters, and running preparedness drills. Providing a measure of the impact of different hazard events potential number of damaged buildings, fatalities and injuries, secondary hazards makes it possible to establish detailed and realistic plans for better response to disasters, which can ultimately reduce the severity of adverse natural events.
Why do we need to study DRRM?
Firstly, it is to help resolve these disaster situations and to give motivated conscientious the citizens, the knowledge and skills to make a difference. Studying risk, crisis.
Resources
http://www.undp.org/content/undp/en/home/ourperspective/ourp erspectivearticles/2012/08/15/building-resilience-the-importance-ofdisaster-risk-reduction.html
https://www.unisdr.org/who-we-are/what-is-drr
https://www.preventionweb.net/risk/drr-drm
https://www.prospects.ac.uk/jobs-and-work-experience/jobsectors/law-enforcement-and-security/why-should-you-studydisaster-management