INTRODUCTION TO DISASTER MANAGEMENT

Introduction

Disaster management typically refers to an organization, which makes planning and preparation to cope up with the condition caused by natural calamities. Disaster management team plays an important role in every country and city. People who are involved in this management team mainly serves commoners who are suffering badly due to environmental disasters like flood, earthquake, and many more.

This essay is mainly focusing on all those effects caused by a natural disaster, which are creating hurdles in the path of development of a country or a city. Along with this, this essay has also focused on all those challenges and opportunities that are mainly caused by disaster management. This essay is mainly serving all these parts regarding disaster management through different points like concepts, opportunities, challenges, and suggestions for the betterment of disaster management team, and for a better understanding of disaster management team. Moreover, it has focused on all those ideas that are needed for a disaster management team to work better.

Thesis statement

The primary aim of this essay is to analyse different aspects of disaster management and opportunities and challenges of disaster relief.

Concept of Disaster Management

According to Coppola (2006, p. 20), disaster management has played an important role in terms of saving people's lives; therefore, importance of this management team has increased with every passing day. It is very true that disasters come in a sudden way, and leaves everyone with a question of how to survive in further future (Saja et al. 2019, p. 10). Therefore, building a proper and professional disaster management team is very much crucial for every country. This essay has focused on points like why disaster management is important in order to ensure people with their survival. A disaster management team not only helps in after cause of a natural calamity but also helps to identify what kind of disaster can take place in a particular area within a certain amount of time (Schweizer & Renn, 2019, p. 13). Along with these, disaster management team also helps to alert people and helps them to take proper protection during that time of disaster. This particular team of disaster management has a direct link with a country's development. As this management team saves people's lives, and people act as a heart of a country in terms of development, therefore, this team of disaster management also serves this purpose of development in a particular country. It has been mentioned previously, that a disaster management team mainly saves people's lives from natural calamities or life-taking disasters. This management team mainly consists of highly professional persons, who can take immediate actions in case of any emergency.

 A disaster management team mainly works in a cycle of five steps, one of which is prevention. Prevention has an important role in order to avoid any kind of notorious disaster (Ritchie & Jiang, 2019, p. 6). Preventing people or educating people in order to create a sense of safety among them is a must followed way for a disaster management team. One thing is also true, that a person or a team cannot always prevent disasters by taking proper prevention. Despite knowing that, maintaining different ways of prevention by implementing different strategies like safeguard devising and all, is an important task that this team of disaster management does. Along with this step of prevention, another step that disaster management team follows is mitigation, which refers to concept of making proper planning in order to avoid disasters (Yu et al. 2018, p. 165). Another one is preparedness, which means preparing individuals, groups, or communities to take necessary steps to avoid different kinds of disasters. Along with these, other two steps that a disaster management team follows are response and recovery. Through this step of response, disaster management team try to help all those survivors of natural calamities with mandatory things like food, drinking water, medicines, and all. Recovery comes at the end, this step takes a lot of time for recovery, and sometimes it takes decades after decades to come up with some dangerous calamity of nature.

Challenges and opportunities of disaster relief

According to Shah et al. (2019), a disaster management team can apply different types of technologies, which will act as opportunities for them. Implementation of  BDA, which is Big Data Analysis, and IOT, which is, the Internet of Things can create a positive difference in disaster management teams (Goniewicz et al . 2020, p. 38). Apart from these, a disaster management team suffers different types of challenges in order to function properly, among all those challenges, a few challenges are, "Irresponsible behavior of citizens", "Lack of education in disaster risk", "Inadequate tools and infrastructure", and "Improper planning".  Irresponsible behavior of citizens like lack of interest in cooperation with disaster management team acts as an important problem. Along with this, lack of education in disaster risk, inadequate tools and infrastructure, and improper planning, all these things act as challenges for this particular management team. 

Suggestions to manage the challenges of disaster relief

It has been suggested by Xu (2019, p. 385), that commercial insurance plays an important role in case of disaster relief. This author has also provided an idea on restructuring the whole system regarding disaster management. Along with all these, an updated recovery plan to cope up with disaster can help the team to avoid estimated casualties. A proper communication can also help this management team to contact needed departments in order to avoid damages due to different disasters. Apart from these, including business operations can also enhance the recovery plan of disaster management. It has been previously mentioned that arrival of natural disasters is uncertain, therefore, testing all those recovery plans in a regular basis can create a significant change in terms of preventing estimated damage (Tomaszewski, 2020, p. 9). Along with all these, developing all skills that are involved in disaster management can help to bring positive change among people. This development includes developing a process of prevention, and a proper skill of critical analysis can bring significant change in order to implementation of prevention (Kirschenbaum, 2019, p. 25).  Changes in this process of mitigation are also important here, developing different types of strategies and changes in structure can decrease an estimated rate of damage. Bringing some changes in preparedness can also create a positive change in disaster management team. Recruiting experienced people in disaster management teams is also an important suggestion to follow. Along with these, bringing changes in another stage of response can create significant change in society. Developing a skill of quick decision-making can help to make a response to all those survivors of disasters (McEntire, 2021, p. 11). Apart from these, involving changes in recovery system is very crucial here. Building a strong relationship with people, and creating a sense of empathy and understanding can create a significant change in the process of recovery.

Conclusion

As per the discussion of the essay, one can get a better view of how, when, and where a disaster management team works. This essay has clearly explained all those five steps include in disaster management. Along with this, it also suggested different types of solutions, applying which can bring a significant change in disaster management. Recruiting experts, developing a skill of critical analysis, and implementing different types of technology can bring a notable change in disaster management. Apart from these, developing different types of strategies also plays an important role in disaster management. This essay has also expressed an idea of involving different types of tools in disaster management teams in order to cope up with different types of disasters. Another idea has also been presented here, which is commercial insurance. Moreover, it can be concluded like this that disaster management plays an important role in society, which helps to provide lives to all those disaster survivors.

 References

Books

Coppola, D. P. (2006). Introduction to international disaster management. Elsevier.DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/B978-0-12-801477-6.00001-0

Kirschenbaum, A. (2019). Chaos organization and disaster management. Routledge.

McEntire, D. A. (2021). Disaster response and recovery: strategies and tactics for resilience. John Wiley & Sons.DOI: https://doi.org/10.1080/19407963.2021.1892124

Tomaszewski, B. (2020). Geographic information systems (GIS) for disaster management. Routledge.DOI: https://doi.org/10.4324/9781351034869

Journals

Goniewicz, K., Khorram-Manesh, A., Hertelendy, A. J., Goniewicz, M., Naylor, K., & Burkle Jr, F. M. (2020). Current response and management decisions of the European Union to the COVID-19 outbreak: a review. Sustainability, 12(9), 3838.DOI: https://doi.org/10.3390/su12093838

Ritchie, B. W., & Jiang, Y. (2019). A review of research on tourism risk, crisis and disaster management: Launching the annals of tourism research curated collection on tourism risk, crisis and disaster management. Annals of Tourism Research, 79, 102812.DOI: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.annals.2019.102812

Saja, A. A., Goonetilleke, A., Teo, M., & Ziyath, A. M. (2019). A critical review of social resilience assessment frameworks in disaster management. International journal of disaster risk reduction, 35, 101096.DOI: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ijdrr.2019.101096

Schweizer, P. J., & Renn, O. (2019). Governance of systemic risks for disaster prevention and mitigation. Disaster prevention and management: an international journal. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1108/DPM-09-2019-0282

Shah, S. A., Seker, D. Z., Hameed, S., & Draheim, D. (2019). The rising role of big data analytics and IoT in disaster management: recent advances, taxonomy and prospects. IEEE Access, 7, 54595-54614.DOI: https://doi.org/10.1109/ACCESS.2019.2913340

Xu, X. (2019). Prospects for disaster management in China and the role of insurance. Environmental Hazards, 18(5), 383-399.DOI: https://doi.org/10.1080/17477891.2019.1609404

Yu, M., Yang, C., & Li, Y. (2018). Big data in natural disaster management: a review. Geosciences, 8(5), 165.DOI: https://doi.org/10.3390/geosciences8050165