Human-made Disasters Research Articles

Development and implementation of an electronic health record system for use in humanitarian emergencies, disaster response, and conflict zones.

Humanitarian medical response to natural and human-made disasters can be complicated by high clinician, staff, and patient turnover. While electronic medical records are being scaled up globally, their use remains limited in humanitarian response settings. The Fast Electronic Medical Record (fEMR) system is an open-source electronic health record system specifically designed for use in resource-limited settings and humanitarian crises. The system was developed between 2010-2014 through an iterative design process with multidisciplinary team members. It was operationalized in settings with and without internet connectivity. We analyzed data on fEMR usage since inception until October 2022 to estimate the number of patients served by the system. In eight years of implementation (2014-2022), the fEMR system has been deployed 60 times to 11 different countries across four different continents by 14 different organizations. These deployments collectively account for over 37,500 patient encounters with an estimated 31,940 distinct patients. The settings of fEMR use ranged from refugee and migrant health clinics near the Mexico-US border to the Poland-Ukraine border in the context of the 2022 war in Ukraine. User feedback demonstrated the program's ease of use by providers of different clinical and technical backgrounds. Feedback primarily emphasized improving the system's hardware requirements and workflow. The simple design allowed for clinician users to adapt the system to a variety of clinical scenarios. Ongoing and future work in adapting electronic health records to international humanitarian response will emphasize data security, patient privacy, equity, and the rapid translation of electronic health data to improve population health. In humanitarian response settings, electronic health records can improve quality of care and provide a source of clinical and management data for public health planning.

Mitigating risks of natural and human-made disasters caused by excessive urbanization

Mitigating risks of natural and human-made disasters caused by excessive urbanization

Loss, Grief and Planetary Literacy in Informational Picturebooks for Children

Death is an inevitable part of life with philosophical, cultural and religious dimensions and its problematic emerges differently in the contemporary era, since it is not only perceived as a fundamental aspect of human existence, but also as a consequence of human-made disasters, as well as an urgent environmental concern. Today literary and, in general, artistic narratives and expressions often explore death beyond human exceptionalism; ecocide; the triple planetary crisis; and the mourning for humanity’s doomed relationship to nature. Several contemporary authors, with the help of the illustrators, write ironic and horrific stories addressed to children that alter the cultural significance of loss and death and propound dark ecological storyworlds, in which the ecological problems as well as the more-than-human vulnerabilities, aspire to make young readers aware of the functions of the pale blue dot they live in and perceive it as the true public space. This article examines how do informational picturebooks for children approach life and death in a more ‘ecosophical’ manner, proving that the planetary turn has made available to literary studies, aiming to make young readers aware of how humans and nonhumans are fundamentally enmeshed in and negatively interdependent with one another.

Landslide-oriented disaster resilience evaluation in mountainous cities: A case study in Chongqing, China

Natural and human-made disasters are threatening cities around the world. The resilience of cities plays a critical role in disaster risk response and post-disaster recovery. In mountainous cities, landslides are among the most frequent and destructive hazards. This study presents a novel methodological framework for assessing the spatial resilience of mountainous cities specifically against landslides. Focusing on Chongqing in the Three Gorges Reservoir region, this study conceptually divides the disaster resilience of mountain cities to landslides into two dimensions: environmental resilience and social resilience. This study developed a comprehensive database by compiling data from 4,464 historical landslide events, incorporating 17 environmental resilience indicators and 16 social resilience indicators. Random forest (RF) model was employed to evaluate environmental resilience, achieving a high AUC of 0.968 and an accuracy of 97.1 %. Social resilience was assessed by the Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP), and comprehensive resilience was ranked by the Technique for Order of Preference by Similarity to Ideal Solution (TOPSIS). Key findings include: (1) Establishing a multi-dimensional resilience indicator system that effectively assesses landslide-oriented resilience in mountainous cities. (2) Comprehensive resilience in mountainous cities exhibit distinct spatial clustering patterns. Regions with lower environmental resilience are mainly characterized by high rainfall and complex terrain. higher social resilience concentrated in city centers, while peripheral regions face challenges due to weaker economies and inadequate healthcare infrastructure. (3) In the future development of mountain cities, comprehensive and sustainable strategies should be adopted to balance the relationship between environmental resilience and social resilience. This study provides a robust framework for disaster prevention and resilience assessment in mountainous cities, which can be applied to evaluate the disaster resistance capabilities of other mountainous cities.

Humanitarian supply chain redesign using a GIS-based two-stage stochastic model: a case study of earthquake in Tehran

The world has experienced many natural and human-made disasters recently. Such disasters can vary from a local residence to a city or even affect a nation or broader areas. This paper presents a multi-objective mixed integer linear programming model for redesigning the humanitarian supply chain network. The proposed two-stage stochastic model optimizes some pre-disaster and post-disaster strategic and tactical decisions, i.e., the location and capacities of facilities, allocation and flow decisions, and pre-positioning strategies. The model aims at minimizing the total fixed and operational costs of the network, minimizing the total distance in the network, and maximizing the total utility of the network. The presented model is validated by examining a real case study focusing on the outbreak of an earthquake in Tehran, the capital city of Iran. Finally, the Pareto optimal solutions of the model are found using the improved augmented ε-constraint method, and some managerial implications are presented.

Racial Trauma Unfolds: The Spectacle of Witnessing George Floyd`s Murder

Abstract In this article, we chart some of the detrimental emotional impacts of what we consider a human disaster: denying Black people’s humanity. We focus on the highly publicized and violent killing of George Floyd by Minneapolis police officers in 2020: 9 minutes and 29 seconds of state-sanctioned, anti-Black violence that was filmed and circulated globally and has sparked the largest racial justice protest and beyond since the civil rights movements of the 1960s. We consider the impacts of viewing this footage, this spectacle, on Black people, seeing this human disaster playing out in front of their eyes through the lens of anti-Black racism (ABR), which serves as an analytic lens to theorize this trauma within the context of visceral and ubiquitous anti-Black racism. We further contextualize these links between racism and trauma by drawing from our firsthand experience, as well as the stories, worries, and feelings shared with us by Black professionals, families, and members of the community. We focus specifically on that shared by Black youth, which has primarily been the focus of our professional work. We conclude by highlighting strategies of resistance to counteract these impacts, as well as shifts to clinical practice that might better address them and structural shifts towards social justice. Keywords: Human-made disasters, mental health, trauma, anti-Black racism, resistance, resilience.

Is Healing Possible in Such a Context? Mourning and Aggression: The Shadow of the Never Commemorated

ABSTRACT This paper aims to examine how the socio-political context influences mourning by focusing on Turkey’s political history and contemporary context. The dynamics of experienced and transferred trauma, dread, aggression, and rage will be explored by integrating the perspectives of Kohut’s Psychoanalytic Self Psychology and Intersubjective Psychoanalysis with other psychoanalytic explanations of mourning. We focus on the social dynamics that transform grief into continuous trauma that is disavowed, repeated, and intensified by political leaders. We specifically address the current context using recent case examples illustrating the experiences of older generations affected by human-made disasters. We discuss the possibilities of recovery from this impact by emphasizing creative solidarity and identification with the forward-edge striving of idealized wounded selves.

Assessment of Urban Resilience to Floods: A Spatial Planning Framework for Cities

Urbanization-led economic growth drives infrastructure investments and population accumulation in cities, hence exploiting natural resources at an extreme rate. In this context, coastal cities have become vulnerable to climate change-induced extreme weather events and human-made disasters in recent history, where effective measures to improve the resilience of cities are pivotal for developing sustainable living environments. This study proposes a framework for assessing urban resilience to natural disasters (floods) using bottom-up spatial interactions among natural, physical, and social systems within cities and regions. It is noted that seminal studies focus on either the mitigation or adaptation strategies within urban environments to assess disaster resilience, where limited multidisciplinary and operational models hinder evaluations at the city scale. Therefore, urban system interactions and quantifiable parameters proposed in this framework are essential for policymakers and disaster management agencies in the timely allocation of resources to optimize the recovery process. Moreover, spatial planning agencies can adopt resilience mapping to identify the potential risk zones and orient sustainable land use management. Urban resilience can be embodied in spatial strategies with the operational framework proposed here, and future urban growth scenarios can be tested in multiple disaster conditions.

Assessing Secondary School Teachers' Disaster Preparedness Using the Pakistan School Safety Framework and Sustainable Development Goals

In response to the potential risks posed by natural or human-made disasters, the Pakistan School Safety Framework (PSSF) was created to serve as a comprehensive strategy aimed at safeguarding the well-being of students, teachers, and school staff. A study was undertaken to evaluate the readiness of secondary school teachers in the face of disasters, utilizing the Sustainable Development Goals and the Pakistan School Safety Framework as guiding principles. An assessment questionnaire comprising 27 items aligned with the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) was meticulously developed and scrutinized by three subject matter experts before implementation for data gathering. The assessment tool encompassed four variables and a total of 27 items. Data was collected from 64 schools and 320 secondary school instructors and was subsequently analyzed using SPSS and Microsoft Excel. The results revealed that the majority of schools fell into the "Slightly Prepared" category based on the assessment outcomes. Following the study, the researcher provided recommendations to enhance disaster preparedness among secondary school teachers. These included the implementation of regular drills, provision of training sessions, and updating of emergency response plans. Moreover, the researcher emphasized the significance of collaboration with local emergency services and community organizations to bolster preparedness efforts and ensure a coordinated response in the event of a disaster.

Emergency budgeting for resilience during the war. The case of Ukraine

IMPACT The article provides insights into the dynamics of emergency budgeting and budget resilience in nations facing human-made disasters, taking the Russian full-scale invasion of Ukraine as a case study. These insights are crucial for policy-makers in both Ukraine and other countries facing socio-economic disruption due to armed conflicts. The research emphasizes the importance of adapting budgeting practices to respond to the challenges and uncertainties of the war, the critical role of international aid in sustaining national budgeting resilience and the need for transparency and accountability in the budgeting processes. As global conflicts and geopolitical tensions continue to rise, the principles of resilience and emergency budgeting discussed in this article have broader implications for the international community—particularly for nations vulnerable to conflict, economic crisis or other human-made disasters.

Evaluation of priority index for enhancing the seismic resilience of tunnels

Tunnels are essential infrastructure elements, offering significant economic, social, and environmental benefits. However, they are particularly vulnerable to seismic risks, especially in regions with high seismic activity. Given their importance in terms of safety, economy, and social factors, it is crucial for the relevant authorities to prepare for natural and human-made disasters by enhancing the seismic resilience of tunnels. In Algeria, where the number of tunnels is high, this necessity is particularly urgent.This article proposes a prioritization model aimed at improving the seismic resilience of tunnels, based on the expertise of specialists and structured into three main steps. The first step involves identifying key criteria, including the tunnel's condition, design phase, availability of alternative routes, social importance, geometric shape, and seismic zone. The second step applies the Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP) to calculate the weights of the criteria and incorporates expert opinions through the Euclidean Distance-Based Aggregation Method (EDBAM). Finally, the third step establishes the Priority Index for Tunnel Seismic Resilience Improvement (PIT).The model was tested on five tunnels, and the classification obtained based on the priority index was found to be well aligned with the observed reality on the ground.

Building Back Better: Exploring the Resilience of Schools in Disaster Recovery

As natural and human-made disasters escalate globally, the urgency to rebuild resilient communities is increasingly evident. With this study, Building Back Better: Exploring the Resilience of Schools in Disaster Recovery explores the experiences, disaster recovery, challenges, coping mechanisms, and insights of three school administrators and four teachers designated as school Disaster Risk Reduction coordinators in the Monkayo East District of Davao de Oro. This study utilized qualitative phenomenological study to delve into the lived experiences of educational professionals during post-disaster recovery. This research aims to gain a deep understanding of the challenges, coping mechanisms, and insights from a purposive sample of four teachers designated as school Disaster Risk Reduction coordinators and three school administrators who have directly engaged with the recovery processes following natural disasters. The data were gathered through an in-depth face-to-face interview and used an audio recorder to record the discussion. The significant finding from the study is the multifaceted and long-lasting impact of disasters on students' learning environments. This finding highlights how disasters not only cause physical damage to school infrastructure but also disrupt the educational process, widen achievement gaps, and affect the emotional well-being of students. The disruption of normal routines and the psychological stress experienced by students underscore the critical need for comprehensive recovery strategies, including academic support and mental health resources, to help students regain stability and continue their education effectively. This emphasizes the importance of preparedness and resilience in educational institutions to mitigate the impact of such crises. This study highlights the need for timely assessments, repairs, and coordination with local authorities to ensure the structural integrity of school facilities. It underscores the importance of disaster preparedness and the implementation of robust recovery strategies to mitigate the impact on the educational environment and maintain a safe and conducive learning space. This focus on infrastructure is foundational, as it directly influences the ability of schools to function effectively post-disaster. Teachers and school heads are pivotal in disaster risk reduction within educational institutions. They create safety plans, organize drills, and educate students on emergency procedures, fostering a culture of preparedness. School heads provide leadership, while teachers act as first responders, guiding students to safety and offering necessary care. Collaboration between teachers, school heads, and stakeholders is crucial for a resilient school environment. By involving the entire school community in planning and implementing safety measures, schools can effectively respond to disasters, ensuring the safety and well-being of everyone involved. This partnership promotes a proactive approach to disaster preparedness, making safety a priority in all school activities.

Requirements Engineering for a Drone-Enabled Integrated Humanitarian Logistics Platform

The pursuit of ameliorating humanitarian logistics (HL) through the integration of cutting-edge technologies has received significant attention in recent years. AIRDROP is a visionary platform conceived to offer a cohesive disaster management approach spanning from preparedness to recovery of a wide range of natural and human-made disasters. AIRDROP aims to be a scalable, modular and flexible solution, employing an array of drones of different sizes and payload capabilities, able to provide different HL services to first responders and operational decision-makers. This study aims to elicit, specify and validate the requirements for AIRDROP to ensure their applicability across a broad spectrum of disaster scenarios and the entire disaster management continuum. This research utilized a thorough literature review and expert consultations to systematically elicit and specify the AIRDROP requirements, ensuring they were grounded in both academic foundations and practical industry standards. The validation process involved a questionnaire survey administered to 26 participants from various professional backgrounds. The requirements were prioritized using the MoSCoW methodology, and significant differences among participant groups were identified through the Kruskal–Wallis H and Mann–Whitney U tests. Furthermore, two critical requirements emerged from open-ended responses. As a result, 276 out of the initially defined 335 requirements in total advanced to the design phase. It is worth noting that the dynamic nature of requirements in HL necessitates ongoing assessment and adaptation to keep AIRDROP at the forefront and aligned with evolving needs.

The causal effect of mental health on labor market outcomes: The case of stress-related mental disorders following a human-made disaster

As disasters increase due to climate change, population density, epidemics, and technology, information is needed about postdisaster consequences for people's mental health and how stress-related mental disorders affect multiple spheres of life, including labor-market attachment. We tested the causal hypothesis that individuals who developed stress-related mental disorders as a consequence of their disaster exposure experienced subsequent weak labor-market attachment and poor work-related outcomes. We leveraged a natural experiment in an instrumental variables model, studying a 2004 fireworks factory explosion disaster that precipitated the onset of stress-related disorders (posttraumatic stress disorder, anxiety, and depression) among individuals in the local community (N = 86,726). We measured labor-market outcomes using longitudinal population-level administrative data: sick leave, unemployment benefits, early retirement pension, and income from wages from 2007 to 2010. We found that individuals who developed a stress-related disorder after the disaster were likely to go on sickness benefit, both in the short- and long-term, were likely to use unemployment benefits and to lose wage income in the long term. Stress-related disorders did not increase the likelihood of early retirement. The natural experiment design minimized the possibility that omitted confounders biased these effects of mental health on work outcomes. Addressing the mental health and employment needs of survivors after a traumatic experience may improve their labor-market outcomes and their nations' economic outputs.

Crisis2Sum: An Exploratory Study on Disaster Summarization from Multiple Streams

Automatic summarization of natural and human-made disaster events is an important area to increase situational awareness for human response organizations and disaster management. However, the incorporation of multiple data sources poses a challenge to current summarization systems, as the typically large document collections exceed the input limits of neural models. Additionally, Large Language Models (LLM) often omit key information present at different positions in long context inputs. Furthermore, disaster reporting requires fine-grained information content and therefore relaxes the restriction to high compression rates, resulting into rather long summaries. In this work, we study different extractive and LLM-based abstractive baselines and highlight shortcomings in present approaches. Our experimental results on the CrisisFACTS datasets show that LLM-based approaches tend to fail in generating long informative summaries. Taking these limitations into account, we propose a disaster summarization framework and introduce query-focused extensions, which demonstrate advantages and superior performance over the baseline methods.

Knowledge-ing as a response-able practice in the Anthropocene: Re-turning (to) the research events like an earthworm

This paper began with the assumption that the habitual practices of knowledge-creation, which have shaped the day-to-day contexts of teachers and researchers, are not greatly different from the practices that have led to human-made catastrophes in the Anthropocene. I pondered over my experiences as a researcher in an attempt to gain insights for thinking about and engaging in knowledge-creation differently to become more response-able in the Anthropocene. Inspired by post-qualitative research practice, I re-turned, like an earthworm, (to) two research events. A theoretical framework informed by critical posthumanism and feminist new materialism guided the process. Through these re-turns, I came to understand that creating knowledge is a complex and indeterminate process that always accompanies the ‘more-than’. Attending to the notion of knowledge-ing, I discussed the ways in which knowledge emerged as a flow that was neither fully graspable nor static through more-than-human intra-actions. What I propose in this paper is not a methodological technique, but rather, a mode of practice that might disrupt our sense of Cartesian self. I offered some suggestions for teachers and researchers to reimagine the practices of knowledge-creation as a way of reinventing their subjectivity and responding to the damaged earth more responsibly.

A MOBILE-BASED LOCALIZATION SYSTEM FOR INFRASTRUCTURE-INDEPENDENT EMERGENCY COMMUNICATION

After natural or human-made disasters, determining the locations of individuals needing urgent assistance is critical and time-sensitive. This paper introduces a novel ad-hoc infrastructure-less communication system for emergency scenarios, relying solely on basic mobile device capabilities. The proposed approach estimates mobile device coordination using multilateration, incorporating path loss theory to transform receiving signal strength into distance. A least square optimization algorithm is also applied to enhance localization accuracy. The system facilitates coordination and communication among citizens and first responders by strategically positioning a few emergency mobile devices as temporary base stations. Mobile devices search for neighboring base stations and transform into temporary base stations upon finding at least four. Those temporary base stations assist farther mobile devices in localization, creating a cascading effect until no more mobile devices are discovered. Simulation demonstrates robustness with a 97% discovery rate, maintaining accuracy even in environmental noise. While promising, real-world validation is essential to assess performance under diverse conditions and practical feasibility.

A MOBILE-BASED LOCALIZATION SYSTEM FOR INFRASTRUCTURE-INDEPENDENT EMERGENCY COMMUNICATION

After natural or human-made disasters, determining the locations of individuals needing urgent assistance is critical and time-sensitive. This paper introduces a novel ad-hoc infrastructure-less communication system for emergency scenarios, relying solely on basic mobile device capabilities. The proposed approach estimates mobile device coordination using multilateration, incorporating path loss theory to transform receiving signal strength into distance. A least square optimization algorithm is also applied to enhance localization accuracy. The system facilitates coordination and communication among citizens and first responders by strategically positioning a few emergency mobile devices as temporary base stations. Mobile devices search for neighboring base stations and transform into temporary base stations upon finding at least four. Those temporary base stations assist farther mobile devices in localization, creating a cascading effect until no more mobile devices are discovered. Simulation demonstrates robustness with a 97% discovery rate, maintaining accuracy even in environmental noise. While promising, real-world validation is essential to assess performance under diverse conditions and practical feasibility.

Fire and Artificial Intelligence (AI): How AI Anticipates Human Behaviour in Fire Situations- Case Study of the Colectiv Fire

Abstract The catastrophic fire at Bucharest’s Colectiv Club marks a profoundly tragic event in Romania’s history, being one of the most significant human-made disasters the country has faced in recent decades. This study seeks to meticulously reconstruct the events of that fateful night through the use of advanced simulation software applications. By doing so, it aims to provide a detailed analysis of the factors leading to the tragedy, which claimed the lives of 64 individuals and caused injuries to 185 others. The objective is to understand better the dynamics and consequences of the fire, potentially leading to improvements in safety protocols and emergency response strategies to prevent such disasters in the future.

A Decision Support Model for Barriers and Optimal Strategy Design in Sustainable Humanitarian Supply Chain Management

Sustainable humanitarian supply chain (SHSC) management enables effective and efficient responses to natural and human-made disasters. Existing literature falls short of offering decision support (DS) models to address the barriers and strategies to designing SHSC. To this end, this study develops a DS model that identifies and prioritizes the barriers to SHSC and determines optimal strategies for mitigating those barriers. This study adopted both qualitative and quantitative approaches. As part of the qualitative approach, a field study was applied using in-depth interviews to determine the barriers and corresponding strategies, while under the quantitative approach, a quality function deployment (QFD) integrated optimization technique was used to prioritize barriers and determine optimal strategies to mitigate the SHSC barriers. The study found that a lack of contingency planning, the prevalence of corruption and political interference, and a lack of social and environmental awareness are the most important barriers, while logistics outsourcing, supply chain (SC) performance management, and SC flexibility are the most essential strategies. We also found that our DS model is highly flexible and can be adapted under different scenarios, which makes the model applicable to different contexts. This study has a significant contribution to literature and practice. We developed a novel decision model that captured cost savings and leveraged both cost and time savings from interrelated strategies to determine the best optimal strategy while applying QFD-integrated optimization modeling. The paper’s findings will assist humanitarian SC managers in designing an effective, efficient, and sustainable humanitarian SC.