DISASTER NOTES Flashcards
What is the definition of a disaster?
An event that causes sufficient human deaths and material damage to disrupt the essential functions of a community, threatening its ability to cope without external help.
Disasters can result from natural processes or technological accidents.
What is the constructionist approach in the context of disaster risk?
A perspective that suggests risk is not objective or measurable, but is a product of cultural, political, social, and historical ways of seeing.
Fill in the blank: _______ are people whose first language is neither English nor French.
Allophones
What are dynamic pressures in the context of disasters?
Factors that channel root causes into unsafe conditions, such as epidemic disease, rapid urbanization, current wars, foreign debt, and export promotion.
What does Emergency Management (EM) refer to?
The organization of people and resources to deal with disasters and emergencies.
What is the difference between lay judgment and expert judgment?
Lay judgment focuses on justice, uncertainty, and who benefits from the risk, while expert judgment is more technical and narrow, often using statistical measurements of risk.
What is hazard identification and risk assessment (HIRA)?
A process that identifies potential hazards and assesses the risks they pose.
True or False: Resilience is defined as the capacity to absorb and recover from the impact of a hazardous event.
True
What does vulnerability assess?
The degree of loss resulting from a potential damaging phenomenon, influenced by physical, social, economic, and environmental factors.
What is the development paradigm in disaster studies?
A perspective that views disasters as resulting from the clash between socio-economic processes that create human vulnerability and natural processes that create geophysical hazards.
Fill in the blank: The _______ model shows how disasters occur when natural hazards affect vulnerable people.
PAR (Pressure and Release)
What are chronic threats?
Routine risks that are rarely the direct cause of large-scale deaths and damages.
What is the significance of the National Disaster Mitigation Strategy in Canada?
A federal initiative aimed at reducing the impact of disasters.
What are unsafe conditions in the context of disaster vulnerability?
The specific forms in which the vulnerability of a population is expressed in time and space in conjunction with a hazard.
What does the term ‘root causes’ refer to?
Widespread and general processes within a society and the world economy that are the underlying causes of vulnerability.
What is the difference between MDCs and LDCs?
MDCs are More Developed Countries with higher economic levels, while LDCs are Less Developed Countries with lower economic levels.
What is social amplification of risk?
When relatively minor threats elicit a disproportionately strong degree of public concern.
What is meant by ‘socially constructed risk’?
The idea that society makes decisions that inadvertently determine who is at risk and what the risks are.
Fill in the blank: _______ is the potential for casualty, destruction, damage, disruption or other form of loss in a particular element.
Vulnerability
What is the engineering paradigm in disaster management?
An early approach focused on the physical causes of natural hazards and the construction of large structures to defend against them.
What does recovery entail after a disaster?
The psychological and physical recovery of the victims, and the replacement of physical resources and the social relations required to use them.
