An Assessment-Based Toolkit for Management of Urban Disasters

Abstract

This paper is derived from a toolkit that was developed for World Vision (WV) to support disaster management in urban areas. There are very few agencies specialised in managing urban disasters in developing countries, but there is growing acknowledgement of the need to address the severe impacts of disasters in cities there; agencies such as WV that include disaster management within other development activities are becoming sensitised to this need and thus commissioned the development of this toolkit. Disaster management in the past has dealt mainly with the emergency stages of a disaster, but now there is agreement about anticipatory pre-disaster activities. A “disaster risk management” (DRM) approach is now more widely recognised, but it places less emphasis on post-disaster response and recovery, which was thus taken into consideration in the toolkit. The toolkit was developed for WV national offices to allow them to assess strengths and shortfalls in existing urban disaster management programs and thereby establishing action plan agendas across the different stages of disaster management relating to the operations and programmatic needs of urban projects relevant to developing countries. The toolkit follows an exploratory method consisting of an assessment-based approach structured along the operational dimensions (OD) of World Vision’s DM cycle—Early Warning, Preparedness, Disaster Mitigation, Response, Recovery and Transition. Each OD consists of five dimensions—physical, social, economic, institutional and natural. Each of these dimensions consists of four parameters, used in assessment matrices. The matrices allow assessing availability and/or extent, quality and satisfaction of inputs in each parameter, and an overall rating for each dimension and the links between the different ODs are also considered. Strengths and shortcomings of the program inputs in each OD can be identified with a corresponding plan of action. Disaster risk reduction and resilience underpin the toolkit.