[BLANK_AUDIO]. Having seen these three films I'm hoping that you're going to have some sense now of the kind of debates within humanitarian response. In this section of the course, I'm going to add a little bit of more to what the films mentioned and try to develop some of those themes. Between 1991 and 2000, there were 2,557 disasters worldwide. More than two thirds happened in countries in the lower third of the human development index. Only 2% occurred in the higher third. The following decade was little different. The Haiti earthquake in 2010 killed 200,000 people. Haiti has a human development index ranking of 161 out of 187. The Pakistan floods of the same year killed tens of thousands. Pakistan is rated 146 on the human development index. So we see immediately that countries which are poor and lack resources are disproportionately affected by what we may have hither to understood as natural disasters. Wars follow a similar pattern. Vast majority of conflicts occurring in sub Saharan African and very resource poor environments. Debates on how to deal with these hazards, such as conflict and earthquakes and floods and so on, have over recent years focused on designing development programs in a way which can decrease the vulnerability of local populace. And make them less susceptible to the impact of these natural hazards. A number ways that we can understand vulnerability. One is economic this is vulnerability of the marginally employed. So this means when a disaster occurs, there is further loss of livelihoods. Those jobs are lost and those people suffer greater levels of vulnerability. There may also be what you might call technological vulnerability. And this really means that there's a different level of loss absorption between rich and poor, urban and rural, ruling elites and those in socio-economic periphery. Residual vulnerabilities may emerge if protection is not built into a process of social change. So when urban development creates new housing, for example, which are not properly earthquake-proofed, then they can become more vulnerable. Human migration can also produce emergent, or previously unexperienced hazards which may give rise to newly generated vulnerabilities. Delinquent vulnerabilities may occur when the public sector ignore obvious hazards. They build houses in unsafe environments, unsafe due to whole variety of possible hazards. Flooding to volcanoes to conflict. Total vulnerabilities can be said to exist where the occurrence of disasters is frequent and devastating, yet people cannot do anything about it. An example of this is flooding in Bangladesh, where every year in the monsoon season large numbers of people die from, from the effects of flooding, but are unable to move out of the flood zone due to a lack of resources. When these hazards have become disasters, the, the impact of these can be felt in, in six ways probably. Or at least six ways. The first is there is a political impact. State capacitys often tend to decline leading to the decline in democratic political processes, the collapse in the rule of law, an increase of vulnerability in a political sense. The impact disasters may also have a human cost secondly, there's obviously loss of life. But it may also lead to a loss of human knowledge, a loss of mobility. If people become disabled, people become injured and require greater healthcare. Impact from that also be felt thirdly in a psychological way. The impact for example of running away from the Boxing Day tsunami and surviving left huge emotional scars on those that were not physically affected by the disaster. Disasters will also fourthly have a financial impact, this is damage to property leading to greater expenditure on reconstruction. These are very difficult to assess of course, because insurance claims are, are famously not a good representation of actual losses. And also of course, self-help and non-monetary payments can never really be accurately calculated. But it's clear that there's a vast impact on financial capacities of disaster affected countries. Fifthly, labor relations and production might breakdown. There may be a decline in people's status. A decline in trade and exchange, there might be great outflows of capital, a scarcity of credit, private sector investment may shrink. There may be a positive financial institutions, a collapse in the value of private holdings, all of these may problematize restruction efforts. And then finally, there's a social impact. There maybe declines in trust and reciprocity. There maybe a collapse in family structures and kind of urban fragmentation might take place. Looting and so on can lead to long term resentments that are difficult to, to, to resolve. And maybe, society may become irreparably changed. How do we respond to these challenges though? Well, in considering the ways that disaster's dealt with, there's a number of overlapping phases which, which are apparent. The first and the most immediate phase is what you might call relief. This is the immediate rescue and relief responses implemented during the initial weeks after disaster. It's undertaken to alleviate human suffering. It is often undertaken, firstly, by local government agencies, local people. Famously, of course, most people who are saved from earthquakes, the effects of earthquakes, are saved by their neighbors. Then later, nongovernmental organizations become involved like domestic and international, and these may together organize search and rescue teams. Try to meet survivor's basic needs of water, food, medical care, and shelter. And try and protect people from subsequent hazard events such as resumption of violence, or a, a sudden aftershock from an earthquake, secondary disease infections, or. Relief also includes things like damage assessments, and evaluation of the effects on basic services, such as electricity, water supply, sanitation. It may also, deals with the outcomes on infrastructure, which is buildings hospitals, road systems. It might also try to deal with crops and to produce a more sustainable food supply. Soil stability, extent of coastline, land erosion may also come into a relief process. And then this process of immediate relief then kind of blends into a second phase of what you might call rehabilitation, or recovery, or reconstruction. And this maybe, attempts to deal with the new situation which the disaster has imposed. It might, for example, establish counciling services for those who are bereaved, or reintegrate former competence. It attempts to also begin a process of reconstruction on a build back better principle. So trying to restore damaged communications networks and commuter transportation and so on, in a way which was better than existed before. To do this, reconstruction often involves a community based needs assessment. Tries to come up with ideas about what people might want for the future based on their own needs and ideas, rather than on some kind of blueprint developed by the agencies often from outside the country affected. And then the third element of response to disaster, and by the far the most controversial and contested, is mitigation. This involves measures which lessen the impact of the disaster phenomenon itself. It tries to improve a community's ability to absorb future disasters with less change, and less damage, and less of an effect. There might be structural mitigation. This often involves building things like dams, or wind breaks, or terracing, or hazard resistance buildings. And then, more contested is non-structural mitigation. These include education programs and policies, changes to land use, crop diversification, the imposition of building codes, forecasting and warning, and, of course, peace building. These are highly political questions. They are contested and controversial, and they ask questions of sovereignty and of moral authority and, of course, post colonialism. They take aid workers into the realm of advocacy, of policy making, and of ethics. For these reasons, questions of humanitarian principle will make up the topic for next week's component of the course. We will look at controversies around the rise of the new humanitarianism and its commitment to ideas of social justice, and in particular, its commitment to bearing witness.
