Vulnerability

Hazard Plus Vulnerability Equals Risk

In the analysis of disaster, risk is basically the product of hazard and vulnerability. Studies carried out in the late 1970s and early 1980s called into question the primacy of the former over the latter and suggested that, as a result of feedback mechanisms, vulnerability is the most important component of risk and the one factor that is most likely to explain it. One problem with both risk and vulnerability is that they are not tangible quantities. In the same way that friction comes into existence when it is mobilized by resistance to a force, so vulnerability is fully manifest only when hazards materialize and threaten a person, asset, or activity. This complicates both the measurement and the understanding of the phenomenon. However, it can be estimated using indicators, which must be applied to whichever of its fundamental dimensions are most important: physical, environmental, social, economic, cultural, health-related (medical and psychological), and institutional (including political). Given that it is a multidimensional phenomenon, vulnerability tends to be complex, with linkages and consequences that affect many socioeconomic processes. In synthesis, the vulnerability approach begins with the principle that people, not physical forces, are the most fundamental cause of risks and disasters. Hence, there is a growing tendency to focus on the vulnerability of communities, because, although the approach can be used at any scale from worldwide to individual, disaster risk reduction must begin at the local level if it is to be successful.

Vulnerability to disaster is often equated with poverty. In strict terms, the two are not entirely synonymous, as poor communities are sometimes able to organize and defend themselves against hazard impacts with some degree of success. This is especially true of indigenous knowledge on how to adapt to hazard, which may have accreted over decades or centuries of attempts to regulate impacts by trial and error. However, it is well known that the world's poor are the most vulnerable, especially where they are marginalized by mainstream political and economic forces. Such groups lack the resources and the political power [Page 981]to reduce hazard impacts. Accordingly, the vulnerability approach to disaster risk reduction, which pays particular attention to social justice, prefers a ‘bottom-up” or grassroots approach, and one that is based on “soft” rather than “hard” measures—that is, it gives preference to social organization, management, and administrative measures (such as land use control) over engineering solutions to hazard problems. Many studies of disaster have shown that the key to success is to encourage participatory governance, or in other words, to give people and communities a stake in the process of managing and reducing their own vulnerabilities and increasing their own resilience.

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