Living with disasters: social capital for disaster governance

This paper explores how social networks and bonds within and across organisations shape disaster operations and strategies. Local government disaster training exercises serve as a window through which to view these relations, and ‘social capital’ is used as an analytic for making sense of the human relations at the core of disaster management operations. These elements help to expose and substantiate the often intangible relations that compose the culture that exists, and that is shaped by preparations for disasters. The study reveals how this social capital has been generated through personal interactions, which are shared among disaster managers across different organisations and across ‘levels’ within those organisations. Recognition of these ‘group resources’ has significant implications for disaster management in which conducive social relations have become paramount. The paper concludes that socio‐cultural relations, as well as a people‐centred approach to preparations, appear to be effective means of readying for, and ultimately responding to, disasters.     

Natural hazard events and social capital: the social impact of natural disasters

This study investigates if and to what extent natural disasters affect social capital. Twelve different events in Europe are examined in a quantitative analysis, using data derived from the European Social Survey and the EM‐DAT International Disaster Database. The study uses social trust as an indicator of social capital and offers evidence that a change in social trust is a possible occurrence during or after a disaster, but that it is not an inevitable consequence of it. The results reveal that social trust decreases after a disaster with a death toll of at least nine. Changes in social capital, therefore, are found to be more probable as the severity of the event increases. National, rather than regional, disasters lead more frequently to significant shifts in social trust. This evaluation of 12 separate cases pinpoints several disasters that have had an effect on social trust, but it does not identify any general patterns, underlining the significance of contextual dependency.     

Building disaster resilience using social messaging networks: the WeChat community in Houston,Texas, during Hurricane Harvey

Analyses of disaster resilience have focused increasingly on the role of social capital and online social networks in recovery. This study complements this field of work by investigating three key issues. First, it examines how a social messaging application, WeChat, helped individuals to access and to mobilise three types of social capital—bonding, bridging, and linking—during Hurricane Harvey, a Category 4 storm that made landfall in Louisiana and Texas in the United States in August 2017, resulting in significant flooding and loss of life. Second, it pinpoints and assesses quantitatively how individuals' WeChat group usage and social capital influenced their post-disaster well-being. Third, it demonstrates how a minority and immigrant community in Houston, Texas, overcame the disadvantages commonly observed in other disaster research through the utilisation of social media. The findings of this study should aid governmental and community efforts to foster resilience in the face of natural and human-induced hazards.     

Social, not physical, infrastructure: the critical role of civil society after the 1923 Tokyo earthquake

Despite the tremendous destruction wrought by catastrophes, social science holds few quantitative assessments of explanations for the rate of recovery. This article illuminates four factors-damage, population density, human capital, and economic capital-that are thought to explain the variation in the pace of population recovery following disaster; it also explores the popular but relatively untested factor of social capital. Using time-series, cross-sectional models and propensity score matching, it tests these approaches using new data from the rebuilding of 39 neighbourhoods in Tokyo after its 1923 earthquake. Social capital, more than earthquake damage, population density, human capital, or economic capital, best predicts population recovery in post-earthquake Tokyo. These findings suggest new approaches for research on social capital and disasters as well as public policy avenues for handling catastrophes.     

Community social capital and individual functioning in the post‐disaster context

Disasters can have severe and long‐lasting consequences for individuals and communities. While scholarly evidence indicates that access to social support can ameliorate their negative impacts, less understood is whether or not neighbourhood social capital can facilitate recovery. This study uses two waves of survey data—collected before and after a significant flood in Brisbane, Australia, in 2011—to examine the relationship between the severity of the event at the individual and neighbourhood level, access to neighbourhood social capital and individual‐level social support, and functioning in the post‐disaster environment. In line with previous research, the results indicate that the severity of the flood is the most salient predictor of post‐disaster functioning. No evidence was unearthed to show that neighbourhood social capital amassed before the flood leads to better functioning subsequently, but the findings do suggest that individual‐level social support can moderate the effect of flood severity on functioning.     

发展中国家灾害经济的特点、成因及对策

发展中国家人口众多，经济技术落后，酱稀缺，抗灾能力低，防灾意识不强，加多不合理经济活动对环境的过度干预以及发达国家转嫁环境灾害和社会危机，致使发展中国家产生灾害的潜在因素日益增加，灾害的成灾损失越来越严重，灾害对经济发展的影响与经济因素对灾害的影响都在日益加深，形成恶性循环。本文从经济学角度提出了防灾减灾就采取的主要对策。     

Social capital's role in recovery: evidence from communities affected by the 2010 Pakistan floods

Pakistan suffered large‐scale flooding in summer 2010 that caused damage amounting to approximately USD 43 billion, claimed the lives of at least 1,700 people, and negatively affected some 20 million others. Observers have debated the degree to which social capital plays a role in recovery after a catastrophe of this magnitude. Using new survey data on 450 residents impacted by the disaster, this study found that, controlling for various confounding factors, the social capital levels of victims serve as robust correlates of life recovery. Other important variables connected with recovery include education and income, family size, occupation, material damage suffered, stability of home, and trauma experience. The findings point to a number of relevant policy recommendations, most notably that during and following major shocks, disaster managers should work to keep the social networks of victims intact so that they can benefit from interaction with family, friends, and neighbours.     

Community-based disaster preparedness and climate adaptation: local capacity-building in the Philippines

Community-based disaster preparedness (CBDP) approaches are increasingly important elements of vulnerability reduction and disaster management strategies. They are associated with a policy trend that values the knowledge and capacities of local people and builds on local resources, including social capital. CBDP may be instrumental not only in formulating local coping and adaptation strategies, but also in situating them within wider development planning and debates. In theory, local people can be mobilised to resist unsustainable (vulnerability increasing) forms of development or livelihood practices and to raise local concerns more effectively with political representatives. This paper focuses on the potential of CBDP initiatives to alleviate vulnerability in the context of climate change, and their limitations. It presents evidence from the Philippines that, in the limited forms in which they are currently employed, CBDP initiatives have the potential both to empower and disempower, and warns against treating CBDP as a panacea to disaster management problems.     

The Lost Creek Fire: managing social relations under disaster conditions

This paper examines some of the social processes associated with disaster conditions. Utilising an asset‐based perspective of community capacity, it focuses on four types of normative systems to interpret the ability of communities to manage disasters through market‐, bureaucratic‐, associative‐, and communal‐based norms. Drawing on experience of a wildfire in the Crowsnest Pass region of southwest Alberta, Canada, in 2003, the tensions and compatibilities among these normative systems are evaluated through interviews with 30 community leaders. The results confirm the contributions of all types of social capital to resiliency, the necessity for rapid use of place‐based knowledge, and the importance of communication among all types and levels of agents. In addition, they point to the value of identifying and managing potential conflicts among the normative systems as a means to maximising their contributions. The integration of local networks and groups into the more general disaster response minimised the impacts on health and property.     

The cultural politics of mining and natural disaster in Indonesia: by fire and sword

Natural disasters are inevitably the outcome of cultural agonisms. The cultural politics of natural disasters are shaped by competing claims and conceptions of ‘nature’. Recent disasters in Indonesia are directly linked to these contending conceptions and the ways in which different social groups imagine risk and reward. The Sidoarjo volcanic mudflow of 2006 represents a volatile and violent exemplar of contending cultural and economic claims. Like other disasters in Indonesia and elsewhere in the developing world, this ‘natural’ disaster is characterised by differing conceptions of ‘nature’ as cultural tradition, divine force, and natural resource. A new extractive project in East Java is exhibiting similar economic and cultural agonisms, particularly around the notion of development, environment, self‐determination, and tradition. This paper examines the ‘disputes over meaning’ associated with natural disasters in contemporary societies, and the ways in which they are related to human culture, social organisation, and hierarchical systems of violence.     

灾害发生时影响居民心理承受能力的社会心理因素分析

目的：探讨影响个体面对自然灾害时心理承受能力的社会心理因素．方法，采用问卷调查的方式，运用因素分析法和相关分析法对1000余名居民进行测评．结果。①个体面对灾害时的心理承受能力的影响因素为。灾害意识、灾时行为、灾害认知、社会支持，②通过相关分析，灾时行为对心理承受能力的影响最大。     

Assessing non‐metro recovery across two continents: issues and limitations

Rural and remote areas of countries such as Australia and the United States are less well‐resourced and often poorer than their city counterparts. When a disaster strikes, therefore, their long‐term recovery can be impeded by being situated ‘over the horizon'. Nonetheless, they are likely to enjoy higher social capital, with ‘locals’ banding together to help restore economic and social life in the wake of a calamitous incident. At the same time, a repeat of extreme events, springing in part from alteration to the landscape through intense human occupation, threatens to derail sustainable recovery processes everywhere, suggesting that renewed emphasis needs to be placed on preparedness. Improved metrics are also required, spanning both pre‐ and post‐disaster phases, to determine effectiveness. Moreover, a focus on the ‘hardening’ of towns offers a better return in limiting damage and potentially hastens the speed of recovery should these places later fall victim to extreme events.     

基于灾度的亚洲巨灾划分标准研究

分析了灾害的双重属性:自然属性和社会属性。灾度是灾害社会属性的定量描述,论述了灾度在灾害分级中的应用。提出了灾度计算模型,该模型的影响因子包括:死亡人数、直接经济损失和受灾人数。收集了1954-2010之间的亚洲灾害,并应用灾度计算模型对收集到的资料进行了计算与分析。提出了亚洲巨灾标准:灾度大于8的灾害为亚洲巨灾。该标准具有计算简便、易于对不同灾害进行比较的特点。     

Social media and disasters: a functional framework for social media use in disaster planning,response, and research

A comprehensive review of online, official, and scientific literature was carried out in 2012–13 to develop a framework of disaster social media. This framework can be used to facilitate the creation of disaster social media tools, the formulation of disaster social media implementation processes, and the scientific study of disaster social media effects. Disaster social media users in the framework include communities, government, individuals, organisations, and media outlets. Fifteen distinct disaster social media uses were identified, ranging from preparing and receiving disaster preparedness information and warnings and signalling and detecting disasters prior to an event to (re)connecting community members following a disaster. The framework illustrates that a variety of entities may utilise and produce disaster social media content. Consequently, disaster social media use can be conceptualised as occurring at a number of levels, even within the same disaster. Suggestions are provided on how the proposed framework can inform future disaster social media development and research.     

Lateral knowledge: shifting expertise for disaster management in Chile

Deemed as technocratic and exclusionary, disaster management has failed in its promise of knowing, let alone controlling, catastrophic events. Consequently, disaster managers are searching outside of science for sense‐making analytics. This paper analyses the emergent narratives articulated by disaster managers in Chile to cope with the uncertain nature of their object of intervention. It explores how knowledge of disasters is modified and enriched by disaster managers in what is termed here as ‘lateral knowledge’: the epistemic adjustment by which practitioners revalidate their expert status by expanding key assumptions about disaster risk reduction. The study, which draws on in‐depth interviews with disaster managers in Chile, suggests that lateral knowledge is established both through the increasing validation of community knowledge and the recognition of politics as a critical mediator in the practice of disaster management. The paper concludes by making the larger point that public understanding of science scholars should pay more attention to the adapting capacities of expertise.     

Prospects for disaster management in China and the role of insurance

ABSTRACT

Natural disasters have serious negative consequences for China and it is necessary to build an effective and efficient disaster relief system. This paper aims to provide suggestions for how to restructure and optimise China’s disaster relief system. This paper first discusses the four main channels through which relief funds are currently distributed in China while also examining the relative share of relief funds directed through each channel. Then, the advantages and disadvantages of these relief channels are compared. Finally, suggestions for how China can reduce the negative economic and social impacts of natural disasters by restructuring and optimising its current disaster relief system are provided. The paper presents several main findings. Currently, government-channelled funds are the most important source of disaster relief in China. However, the actual ratio of relief funds from the government to the total amount of losses and the ratio of relief funds from the four channels added together are both very low. This paper argues that the role of commercial insurance in disaster relief is far from sufficient. Importantly, suggestions are also provided on how to restructure the system and on the relative role that each of these channels should play in China’s disaster relief system.     

Deconstruction of destruction stories: narrative,inequality, and disasters

A commonly‐held belief is that natural disasters do not discriminate. This paper, though, poses the following theoretical question: what does the elision of race, class, and gender in the news media say about disasters in the neoliberal era? It draws on the author's analysis of two prominent newspapers—The New York Times and USA Today—and their coverage of the recovery process after devastating tornadoes in two towns in the United States (Tuscaloosa, Alabama, and Joplin, Missouri) in 2011. The study asserts that the narrative of the news media is one with which people are familiar and that it fits into larger ‘formula stories’. It utilises theoretical treatments of narrative to demonstrate how differences are erased and how they lead to complicity in hegemonic representations. Critical theory is used to elucidate why this occurs, and the paper sources Goldberg (2002) in suggesting that the news media employs ‘fantasies of homogenisation’ when representing post‐disaster communities.     

‘Schismo‐urbanism’: cities,natural disaster,and urban sociology

This paper examines a city and a natural disaster, specifically New Orleans, Louisiana, after Hurricane Katrina of August 2005. Recovery here is ongoing and the process of return is incomplete, with long‐term dislocation to other cities in the United States, such as Houston, Texas. The question arises as to how planning and stratification influence evacuation and return/dislocation and how they result in a particular practice of adaptation. This interrelated process is conceptually integrated and termed ‘schismo‐urbanism’ and is analysed within a multidimensional theoretical framework to evaluate aspects of urban sociology and natural disasters. Empirical research is based on a quantitative and qualitative mixed‐method case study. Data were collected during two rounds of field research in New Orleans and Houston in 2007 and 2009. As a comparative socio‐spatial study of affected and receptor communities, it makes a novel theoretical and methodological contribution to research on urban disasters in the context of continuing and rapid social change, and is targeted at disaster researchers, planning theorists and practitioners, and urbanists.     

Capital assets framework for analysing household vulnerability during disaster

This paper examines the vulnerability of households to disasters, using an asset vulnerability framework to represent livelihoods. Such frameworks are widely employed to analyse household poverty and focus on living conditions and well-being rather than money-metric measures of consumption and income. The conceptualisation of household vulnerability is a challenge in current studies on coping with disasters. The paper considers whether a capital assets framework is useful in identifying and assessing household vulnerability in the context of the Wenchuan earthquake in China in 2008. The framework has five categories of assets (financial, human, natural, physical, and social capital) and attempts to measure the resilience and vulnerability of households. When applied to a major disaster, asset-based methods face the problem of heterogeneity of the population, such as with regard to livelihood type or residence. Moreover, the effect of external interventions, such as the provision of relief assistance, must be taken into account.     

关于社会因素对灾害的影响

在分析影响灾害主要因素的基础上,以具体灾害实例着重分析了社会因素对灾害的影响,指出社会因素影响灾害主要通过影响灾害源,承灾体的防、抗灾能力,同时社会经济发展水平对灾害损失也有很大影响。