Temporal vulnerability in hazardscapes: Flood memory-networks and referentiality along the North Carolina Neuse River (USA)

Social models of population vulnerability to disasters increasingly include the notion that vulnerability has a strong temporal component. While this temporality is typically conceptualized as objective (making vulnerability “dynamic,” “multiscalar,” and/or “historical”), it consistently fails to acknowledge that among stakeholders managing hazardscapes temporality is also a social process in which subjective experience of time may play a role in creating situations of population vulnerability. This paper proposes that the temporal situatedness of a population relative to past hazard events and the quality with which stakeholders engage hazard memory-chains combine to significantly influences its vulnerability to natural hazards. It is proposed that this temporal vulnerability is characterized by shared, population level potential for surprise and can be evaluated by exploration of time-series depth and temporal reference points in historical ecological narratives and documents. Based on ethnohistoric research conducted from 2002 to 2006 in flood-prone eastern North Carolina (USA), it is illustrated how temporal vulnerability was relatively higher in the Neuse River watershed located at the City of Kinston than surrounding watersheds. Due to the combination of factors including the damming of the Neuse River in the 1980s, outdated official floodplain maps, relatively unmonitored floodplain development, the stochastic timing of flood events (placing the last major flood more than a generation away), technological optimism, and turnover of floodplain officials and residents, local stakeholders were seriously misinformed about the space-time risks involved both before and after the disaster of Hurricane Floyd (1999) happened. To deal with this inconsistency, the temporal rarity of Hurricane Floyd as a “500-year event” has been motivated and embraced by many in an effort to continue life-as-is. The paper proposes that the concept of temporal vulnerability is further explored and used as key dimension in the vulnerability sciences.     

城市化防震减灾经济性研究

本文通过对东南沿海地震背景和地震破坏性经济损失,结合国内外城市化进程中防震减灾经济性对比研究,认为地震破坏的负面效应所带来的经济损失十分巨大。因而必须加强防震减灾工作为保障城市化顺利发展服务。     

Research on Cultural Dimension of Natural Disaster:A Literature Review

Culture provides an important perspective to understand society. It is one of the key factors that impact how people behave themselves, interact with one another, view the world; what they believe and value. Therefore, a good understanding of public disaster awareness and disaster coping is impossible without taking their culture context into consideration. Since the 1960s, cultural dimension in disaster issues and/or disaster reduction practices has been attracting increasingly attention; many empirical or theoretical explorations have been reported. This review aims to give an overview of research progresses on how culture impacts public awareness and coping of disasters, and analyze the corresponding implications for disaster research and disaster reduction practice. This review summarizes that: ①There is unanimous consensus on public awareness and coping of disaster, which are affected by their culture context. While the knowledge about the ways and degree of impact is still limited, further research is warranted. In addition, more systematic and in-depth studies conducted from cross-cultural perspectives are needed to design to further explore the origins of variance in public disaster awareness and coping, and to what extent from cultural differences. ②Research on public awareness of disaster, emergency response and recovery indicated that culture might have double-side impacts on disaster management—sometimes cultural factors such as value, norm, custom and belief might lead to people more vulnerable than the others, even could be the root causes, but they could also be the source of people’s resilience to disaster in some cases. How to identify those positive and negative impacts, then develop cultural-oriented disaster management policy is a challenge issue, which need special attention. ③There is an increasing acknowledgement that local knowledge and disaster subculture could play an important role in public disaster coping, while the lacking of the awareness of the value of local knowledge, the change of lifestyle, and the impact from external culture pose a threat to the inheritance of some local, traditional disaster coping strategies. So exploring how to conserve, protect, identify, document them, then combine them with modern science and technology should and will be the focus of relevant studies. On the bases of these summarizations, in terms of cultural dimension of natural disaster research in China, systematic and in-depth studies are needed to explore how Chinese culture affects public disaster awareness and coping, what cultural resources can be used in disaster (risk) reduction and for building and enhancing disaster resilience, and how to use them.     

Unveiling hidden migration and mobility patterns in climate stressed regions: A longitudinal study of six million anonymous mobile phone users in Bangladesh

Climate change is likely to drive migration from environmentally stressed areas. However quantifying short and long-term movements across large areas is challenging due to difficulties in the collection of highly spatially and temporally resolved human mobility data. In this study we use two datasets of individual mobility trajectories from six million de-identified mobile phone users in Bangladesh over three months and two years respectively. Using data collected during Cyclone Mahasen, which struck Bangladesh in May 2013, we show first how analyses based on mobile network data can describe important short-term features (hours–weeks) of human mobility during and after extreme weather events, which are extremely hard to quantify using standard survey based research. We then demonstrate how mobile data for the first time allow us to study the relationship between fundamental parameters of migration patterns on a national scale. We concurrently quantify incidence, direction, duration and seasonality of migration episodes in Bangladesh. While we show that changes in the incidence of migration episodes are highly correlated with changes in the duration of migration episodes, the correlation between in- and out-migration between areas is unexpectedly weak. The methodological framework described here provides an important addition to current methods in studies of human migration and climate change.     

葫芦岛市龙港区渔民村发生罕见冰灾及成因分析

2007年1月5日葫芦岛市龙港区渔民村发生罕见冰情灾害,国家海洋环境预报中心的科研人员对冰灾进行了实地考察.本文较详细地介绍了冰情灾害状况,并根据有关的海洋和气象的观测资料,对冰灾发生的成因进行了分析研究,这对今后的防冰减灾具有重要的意义.     

热带气旋灾害的模糊数学评价

对１９７９—１９９６年登陆广东省的热带气旋灾害进行了分析，并采用模糊数学方法提出了灾害评估模型，计算出历次登陆热带气旋的综合灾害指数，根据指数进行分级（５级），得到轻重不同的灾害判据。结果表明，综合灾情指数基本能反映经济损失的大小，可见该模型是可行的。     

无线应用协议WAP在气象防灾减灾信息传播中的应用

简单介绍了无线应用协议WAP的技术特点,认为WAP技术使得手机可以上网浏览获取大量因特网信息;WAPPush可以直译成WAP服务推送技术,且WAPPush的信息传送由服务器发起,克服了因特网浏览服务方式由用户发起的不足,使得手机用户也可以被动获取信息。移动气象公众服务系统设计,主要是应用WAP和WAPPush技术开发气象信息WAP网站,提供天气预警信息推送服务。其设计目标是普通公众的手机可以获取大量的气象信息,以及具有突发、不定时等特点的气象预警信息。     

杭州市高温致灾因子危险性风险区划

利用杭州市各气象观测站和自动气象站多年气温资料,以及数理统计方法和Arc GIS空间分析技术,采用极端高温与高温日数作为高温致灾因子风险的主要评价指标,分析杭州市高温天气的气候特征,对杭州市高温灾害致灾因子危险性进行了区划。结果表明,杭州市高温天气灾害较为严重,常出现38.0℃以上的高温,40.0℃以上也不少见,最高达到42.9℃;高温日数较长,最长持续时间超过50 d。杭州市高温灾害危险性风险高值区大部分集中在杭州城区所在的东北部平原,包括上城区、下城区、拱墅区、江干区、滨江区、西湖区西南部、萧山区及余杭区大部。另外,富春江、分水江等沿江两岸,西南部的河谷、盆地以及中部地势较复杂的谷地、盆地等低海拔地区也处于高温危险性中高值区域;北部天目山、西北部昱岭及白际山、西南部千里岗山及龙门山脉高海拔地区均属于危险性风险低值区域。     

ESSP框架下几种灾害的研究进展——2006年地球系统科学联盟(ESSP)全球环境变化科学大会综述

简要介绍了2006年11月9—11日在北京召开的地球系统科学联盟(ESSP)全球环境变化科学大会的基本内容,着重论述了全球环境变化背景下,海平面上升、城市疾病灾害、非洲的灾害以及灾害风险评估与管理等当前灾害研究热点领域的最新进展。从大会与灾害相关分会场的讨论内容可以看出,未来国际灾害研究关注的重点问题包括:理解和研究气候变化,以及气候与生态系统和人类社会之间的相互影响;加强对决定沿海系统脆弱性因素的评估,开展避免和减轻海平面上升影响的适应性研究;推进全球环境变化对人类健康影响途径和机制的深入研究;区域食物安全和饥荒依然是全球环境变化背景下非洲发展的重要议题;增强国际社会开展灾害风险评估、灾害预警、应急和恢复等风险管理方面的研究,探讨利用灾害制图、GIS和GPS等技术,对灾害多发地区,特别是沿海地区的灾害影响与损失进行评估。     

A less disastrous disaster: Managing response to climate-driven hazards in the Cayman Islands and NE Brazil

This paper explores the relationship between disaster risk reduction and long-term adaptive capacity building in two climate vulnerable areas—the Cayman Islands in the Caribbean and Ceará, in NE Brazil. Drawing on past applications of the disaster risk reduction framework, we identify four critical factors that have led to reductions in risk: flexible, learning-based, responsive governance; committed, reform-minded and politically active actors; disaster risk reduction integrated into other social and economic policy processes; and a long-term commitment to managing risk. We find that while the presence of these factors has reduced overall risk in both regions, in Ceará, disaster response as it is currently practiced, has fallen short of addressing the fundamental causes of vulnerability that leave those prone to hazards able to cope in the short term, yet enmeshed in poverty and at risk from the longer-term changes associated with climate change. Although calls for integration of disaster risk management with poverty eradication are not new, there has been insufficient attention paid in the literature on how to foster such integration. Based on the two case studies, we argue that the adoption of good governance mechanisms (such as stakeholder participation, access to knowledge, accountability and transparency) in disaster risk reduction policy may create the policy environment that is conducive to the kind of structural reform needed to build long-term adaptive capacity to climate-driven impacts. We conclude that without a synergistic two-tiered approach that includes both disaster risk reduction and structural reform, disaster risk reduction, in the face of climate changes, will prove to be an expensive and ineffective palliative treatment of changing risks.