Really nice post- Thanks for writing this! Lot of thoughts- but just a few below for now:
From my experience in Natural hazard research in various countries (Mexico, Indonesia, Carbbean, S America) I can certainly confirm this statement:
One of the major issues with natural disaster prevention is that many believe that the necessary work is already in place, which I don’t think is the case in many countries.
The impacts are also strongly weighted by population exposure and vulnerability, especially for Earthquakes. For example, the magnitude 7 earthquake in Haiti (a strong but not unusual earthquake -occuring ~once a month somewhere in the world), killed 200,000-300,000 people. So targeted preparedness & research in some regions could be significantly more effective.
Even if there is some organisation/​preparedness in some areas/​for some hazards, the low frequency, high impact natural disasters often catch orgs/​charities out (e.g. we see this with recent Tsunami disasters in Japan and Indonesia), so again action in this area, might be most neglected and therefore effective.
Really nice post- Thanks for writing this! Lot of thoughts- but just a few below for now:
From my experience in Natural hazard research in various countries (Mexico, Indonesia, Carbbean, S America) I can certainly confirm this statement:
The impacts are also strongly weighted by population exposure and vulnerability, especially for Earthquakes. For example, the magnitude 7 earthquake in Haiti (a strong but not unusual earthquake -occuring ~once a month somewhere in the world), killed 200,000-300,000 people. So targeted preparedness & research in some regions could be significantly more effective.
Even if there is some organisation/​preparedness in some areas/​for some hazards, the low frequency, high impact natural disasters often catch orgs/​charities out (e.g. we see this with recent Tsunami disasters in Japan and Indonesia), so again action in this area, might be most neglected and therefore effective.