Socio-Economic Perspective of Disaster Risk Reduction and Recovery – Understanding Socio-Technological Means of Sustainability

Abstract

One of the biggest challenges before the mankind is to protect the developmental gains which had been hard earned over the ages, against the increased exposure to various types of risk and vulnerabilities caused by disasters. Disasters causes loss of life, valuable assets, degrades environment thereby damaging acutely the social and economical foundation of our civilization, hence time has now come to initiate plans and programs for risk reduction, mitigation, readiness and recovery for sustainability of our growth, development and progress. The fulcrum of development has been achieving desperate and robust economic growth even at the cost of damages to livelihoods, environment, socio-economic structures, culture and increased levels of risk, exposure and vulnerabilities. The poor are becoming poorer, inequities in the societies are widening and large scale political instability urgently merits a much deeper, pragmatic, integrated and proactive approach to disaster risk reduction and recovery plans and policies in the context of the dynamic socio-economic macro–environment which would lead to success and sustenance of development of societies and communities at large. Mostly, due to tight budgets governments tend to spend less on prevention and risk reduction and more on post-disaster response and recovery because investments in disaster risk reduction may not yield visible and measurable benefits for many years and also get less media attention and thus limited non-governmental funds. Disaster loss is assessed in terms of injuries and death, destruction of fixed assets and infrastructure, disruptions in the flow of goods and services adversely effecting economic factors like GDP growth rates, indebtedness levels and fiscal deficits of a nation ignoring the social loss.