Abstract
Abstract. After several tsunami events with disastrous consequences around the world, coastal countries have realized the need to be prepared to minimize human mortality and damage to coastal infrastructures, livelihoods and resources. The international scientific community is striving to develop and validate methodologies for tsunami hazard and vulnerability and risk assessments. The vulnerability of coastal communities is usually assessed through the definition of sets of indicators based on previous literature and/or post-tsunami reports, as well as on the available data for the study site. The aim of this work is to validate, in light of past tsunami events, the indicators currently proposed by the scientific community to measure human vulnerability, to improve their definition and selection as well as to analyse their validity for different country development profiles. The events analysed are the 2011 Great Tohoku tsunami, the 2010 Chilean tsunami, the 2009 Samoan tsunami and the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami. The results obtained highlight the need for considering both permanent and temporal human exposure, the former requiring some hazard numerical modelling, while the latter is related to site-specific livelihoods, cultural traditions and gender roles. The most vulnerable age groups are the elderly and children, the former having much higher mortality rates. Female mortality is not always higher than male mortality and not always related to dependency issues. Higher numbers of disabled people do not always translate into higher numbers of victims. Besides, it is clear that mortality is not only related to the characteristics of the population but also of the buildings. A high correlation has been found between the affected buildings and the number of victims, being very high for completely damaged buildings. Distance to the sea, building materials and expected water depths are important determining factors regarding the type of damage to buildings.
Highlights
Natural disasters are triggered by extreme natural phenomena and become disasters because of the heightened vulnerability of the people and places where they occur (Mazurana et al, 2011)
A comprehensive review of the existing works on tsunami vulnerability assessment based on indicators has been carried out to identify those currently used to assess human vulnerability
Population or population density in the exposed area might be a valid indicator. This statement is reinforced by some of the results provided in this article, such as those related to the distance to the sea
Summary
Natural disasters are triggered by extreme natural phenomena and become disasters because of the heightened vulnerability of the people and places where they occur (Mazurana et al, 2011). Tsunamis were the most deadly sub-type of earthquake, with an average of 79 deaths for every 1000 people affected, compared to four deaths per 1000 for ground movements. This makes tsunamis almost 20 times more deadly than ground movements (CRED, 2015). The aim of this work is to understand whether the scientific community is proposing the right indicators to measure human vulnerability in light of past tsunami impacts. It focuses on the analysis of past tsunami events to understand and integrate the vulnerability conditions that worsened the tsunami human impacts. The specific objectives of this paper are to (i) compile some of the indicators currently applied to assess human vulnerability to the tsunami hazard and, based on them, propose a general scheme to homogenize tsunami human vulnerability concepts and indicators; (ii) validate the indicators as far as possible through available data from past tsunami events; and (iii) identify new indicators or approaches through the evidences detected in those past tsunami events
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