Abstract
Fires cause over 300,000 deaths annually worldwide and leave millions more with permanent injuries: some 95% of these deaths are in low- and middle-income countries. Burn injury risk is strongly associated with low-income and informal (or slum) settlements, which are growing rapidly in an urbanising world. Fire policy and mitigation strategies in poorer countries are constrained by inadequate data on incidence, impacts, and causes, which is mainly due to a lack of capacity and resources for data collection, analysis, and modelling. As a first step towards overcoming such challenges, this project reviewed the literature on the subject to assess the potential of a range of methods and tools for identifying, assessing, and addressing fire risk in low-income and informal settlements; the process was supported by an expert workshop at University College London in May 2016. We suggest that community-based risk and vulnerability assessment methods, which are widely used in disaster risk reduction, could be adapted to urban fire risk assessment, and could be enhanced by advances in crowdsourcing and citizen science for geospatial data creation and collection. To assist urban planners, emergency managers, and community organisations who are working in resource-constrained settings to identify and assess relevant fire risk factors, we also suggest an improved analytical framework based on the Haddon Matrix.
Highlights
Fires cause over 300,000 deaths annually and are the fourth largest cause of accidental injury globally
Fires are a frequent and significant “extensive” risk in urban environments, especially in unplanned and densely populated low-income or informal settlements, which are characterised by poor-quality housing and limited supporting infrastructure and services
Urban fires are neglected in disaster management policy and practice
Summary
Fires cause over 300,000 deaths annually and are the fourth largest cause of accidental injury globally (after road accidents, falls, and drowning). Little is known about the incidence, impact, and causes of urban fires in these countries, in lower-income and informal settlements, which are growing rapidly in an urbanising world. This is largely neglected as a policy issue, which is partly due to the lack of reliable data on incidence and impact at both national and local levels, coupled with inadequate financial, material, technical, and human capacities to act to reduce fire risk. Data on the incidence and impact of urban fires in lower-income countries and communities are very limited and uneven, as we discuss below, and local authorities often have very little information on the built environment and populations in informal settlements [3]. Between 2011 and 2015 there were 547 fire outbreaks in the Western Area, with residential fires comprising 87% of the total [13]
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