Conclusion and implication Essay

Failure to make use of available hazard-reduction information and measures of known effectiveness constitutes another general policy issue. It is one that assists to stimulate the ongoing UN-sponsored International Decade for Natural Disaster Reduction (Mitchell, 1988). In many places it would be potential to mitigate losses simply by putting what is known into effect. For instance, the value of warning and evacuation systems has been proven repeatedly; yet such systems are often underused. Likewise, hazard-mitigation schemes offer consistent paths toward reducing the long-term costs of disasters but they are often resisted in favour of instant post-disaster relief, insurance, and compensation programmes. Why do individuals and governments fail to make optimal use of available knowledge? There is no single answer to this question. A large number of factors are involved. Lack of agreement about definition and identification of problem; †¢ Lack of attentiveness of hazards; †¢ Misperception or misjudgement of risks; †¢ Lack of awareness of suitable responses; †¢ Lack of proficiency to make use of responses; †¢ Lack of money or resources to pay for responses; †¢ Lack of harmonization among institutions; †¢ Lack of attention to correlation between â€Å"disasters† and â€Å"development†; †¢ Failure to treat hazards as related problems whose components require simultaneous attention (i. e. reciprocity); †¢ Lack of access by affected populations to decision-making; †¢ Lack of public confidence in scientific knowledge; †¢ Conflicting goals among populations at risk; †¢ Fluctuating salience of hazards (competing priorities); †¢ Public opposition by negatively affected individuals and groups. Underlying all of these explicit reasons is a larger problem. It is this: society fails to take care of natural hazards as complex systems with several components that often require simultaneous attention. We tinker with one or another aspect of these systems when what are required are system-wide strategies. Perhaps even more significant, we fail to address the direct connection between natural hazard systems and economic investment decisions that drive the procedure of â€Å"development† and affect the potential for disasters. That such links subsist has been known for a very long time: If a man owes a debt, and the storm engulfs his field and carries away the produce, or if the grain has not grown in the field, in that year he shall not make any revisit to the creditor, he shall alter his contract and he shall not pay interest for that year. But mainly of the decisions that are taken to build new facilities or redevelop old ones, or to take on new production and distribution processes, or to develop new land, or to effectuate a myriad of other development goals are not currently very receptive to considerations of natural hazards. They must become so. And that is a task that will require a great deal of effort by natural hazard scientists to go beyond the laboratory and the research office or the field study site to obtain an understanding of how best to apply their expertise in public settings. It will also need the users of scientific information about hazards (architects, engineers, planners, banks and mortgage companies, international development agencies, and investment financiers) to foster a mutually interactive correlation with the scientists who are producers of that information. â€Å"Development† is only one of the main public issues that overlap with natural hazards reduction. Others include: environmental management; public health; security (personal, social, and national); and urbanization. All of them are major hitch sets in their own right, each patterned by philosophical and managerial disputes and unsettled issues. Efforts to work out commonly supportive policies and programmes raise entirely new sets of appropriate issues for hazards experts. References: †¢ Dombrowsky, Wolf R. 1995. â€Å"Again and Again: Is a Disaster What We Call ‘Disaster’? Some Conceptual Notes on Conceptualizing the Object of Disaster Sociology. † International Journal of mass Emergencies and Disasters (Nov. ), Vol. 13, No. 3, 241-254. †¢ Crozier, M. and Friedberg, E. (1979) Macht und Organisation, Berlin: Athenaum. (in German). †¢ IDNDR (International Decade for Natural Disaster Reduction). 1996. Cities at risk: Making cities safer †¦ before disaster strikes. Supplement to No. 28, Stop Disasters. Geneva: IDNDR. †¢ Maskrey, Andrew. 1989. 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