Disaster Risk Reduction and Resilience Concepts
This domain tests whether you can separate hazard, exposure, vulnerability and capacity, and use those terms precisely when explaining risk and resilience. Expect distinctions between DRR, disaster risk management and emergency response, plus the ability to apply a resilience lens to a community scenario.
Core rules and concepts
- A hazard is a process or event with potential to cause harm. It becomes a disaster only when it disrupts a community severely enough that local capacity is exceeded and outside assistance is needed.
- Disaster risk is commonly described as a function of hazard, exposure and vulnerability, moderated by capacity. Risk rises with likelihood and severity of the hazard and with exposure; it falls as capacity improves. Vulnerability has physical, social, economic and environmental dimensions.
- DRR is policy and practice that prevents new risk, reduces existing risk and manages residual risk. DRM is the wider cycle covering prevention, mitigation, preparedness, response and recovery. Resilience is the capacity to absorb, adapt and transform, not merely to bounce back to the pre-disaster state.
- Residual risk must still be prepared for; not all risk can be eliminated.
Worked example
A town has 500 houses on a floodplain. Heavy rainfall is the hazard; the houses and people are exposure. Poor drainage, insecure tenure and a high share of older residents are vulnerabilities. A working radio warning system and trained volunteers are capacities. A precise risk statement names all four elements rather than saying simply that the town is at risk of flooding. Relocating houses reduces exposure; drainage and social support reduce vulnerability; warning and shelters raise capacity. The risk that remains after these measures is residual risk and must be addressed through preparedness.
Traps that cost marks
- Calling every hazard a disaster.
- Omitting capacity and treating risk as hazard alone.
- Defining resilience only as returning to normal.
- Treating DRR as another name for emergency response.