International Journal of Disaster Risk Reduction

Research on post-disaster mobilities in small island developing states has largely offered global-level analyses, and if regional, mostly focused on the Pacific. This article helps fill this gap by offering a Caribbean perspective on environmental risk and response—it uses de Haas' [1] aspirations-capabilities framework to revisit the mobility patterns and outcomes of three large-scale geological and hydro-meteorological disasters, representing the two most prevalent hazard types in the region. It draws on secondary sources to qualitatively contextualize the structural factors that affected mobilities following the eruption of the Soufriére Hills volcano in Montserrat in 1995, the 7.0 magnitude earthquake in Haiti in 2010, and the passage of Hurricane Irma across Barbuda in 2017. It generates disaster- and region-specific results, and finds several factors that exacerbate inequalities at the individual and household levels, including the nature of the country's historical relationship with receiving States, and a reliance on ad hoc disaster responses by foreign actors. In concluding, the article proposes three policy foci for facilitating more just post-disaster mobilities in the region. These center the need for more coordinated mobility governance, including the strengthening of regional and international legal frameworks to protect those forced to leave their homes.

Climate hazards are a particular concern for the Caribbean region, especially droughts, which cause significant damage in the agricultural sector. However, studies on agricultural drought risk mapping are lacking for the Caribbean region, including Haiti. Thus, a comprehensive agricultural drought risk assessment integrating all risk components with their respective influencing indicators is urgently needed to generate structured drought risk information for drought mitigation strategies and proactive response. This study performs an exhaustive assessment of agricultural drought risk, integrating all risk components (vulnerability, hazard, exposure, and the adaptive capacity) with their appropriate parameters essential to plant development. A total of eighteen corresponding spatial indicators are defined to develop agricultural drought risk maps. Fuzzy logic was applied to standardize the various drought aspects in a range of 0-1 followed by the aggregation of drought vulnerability, hazard, exposure, and adaptive capacity indicators to quantify and develop detailed agricultural drought risk maps. Drought risk was analyzed at two different stages: (i) using the risk equation without including the adaptive capacity, and (ii) including the adaptive capacity as a risk component in the risk equation. The first approach produces higher (45.8%) moderate to very-high drought risk than the second (30.7%). The resulting cartographic products can assist in visualizing critically drought-stressed areas and stakeholders, and policy makers can use them to make better decisions to cope with drought in the farming sector.

Fiji housing stock suffers extensive damage during the annual cyclone season, leading to high costs in repairing and reconstructing the damaged properties. Historically Fijian houses were resilient, and the communities could self-recover from natural hazards. The country's more recent disasters have been beyond the country's ability to self-recover. Reasons for this include reliance on international aid, new housing types and materials, population changes and the loss of traditional building methods. Tropical Cyclone Winston in 2016 led to over 30,000 damaged houses, and many villages were totally destroyed. Navala was one of the damaged villages in the inner west, where most of its houses were constructed mainly as traditional houses. In this village, fifty percent of houses survived the cyclone. This study investigates Navala traditional houses, their constructability, and the apparent ability of its houses to resist cyclone hazards. The study's main findings show that traditional knowledge of building traditional houses still exists. Also, traditional houses, especially those with central posts, performed well during the cyclone and complied with the internationally recommended cyclone-resistant structural features. The study analysed the construction of traditional houses and highlighted the unique cyclone-resistant features that could be recommended for regional implementation in future constructed houses.

The participatory approach to Disaster Risk Management (DRM) considers socio-economic factors and facilitates the incorporation of local and indigenous knowledge into management plans while offering an opportunity to all resource users to have an input. Caribbean WaterNet/Cap-Net UNDP, Global Water Partnership-Caribbean (GWP-C), and the Faculty of Food and Agriculture, The University of the West Indies (FFA, UWI) conducted a series of regional training of trainers’ workshops in Integrated Urban Flood Risk Management and Drought Risk Management to build regional capacity in this approach. The trainings took place over two years in six (6) Caribbean Small Island Developing States (SIDS). Over 150 persons from a range of sectors relevant to water resource management participated and contributed. The workshop gathered information on sectoral impacts, potential mitigation measures and challenges of hydro-climatic hazards. Capacity building and knowledge transfer was evaluated at two stages; at the end of the last day of training and 6 months after, as part of a monitoring and evaluation assessment. Both the initial and 6-month evaluations revealed significant knowledge transfer and subsequent institutional and policy impacts. Initial evaluation indicated 99% participant satisfaction with both training content and structure. In the six-month evaluation, 85% of participants indicated that the knowledge gained was used to improve their work performance and, in some cases, contributed to changes in institutional policy and frameworks.

The 2017 hurricane season in the Caribbean Basin recorded 18 events (storms and hurricanes), including Category 5 hurricane Irma on which this article focuses. The aim of this study is to analyse the ‘window of opportunity’ of the post-Irma reconstruction in Saint Martin. Located 250 km north of Guadeloupe, Saint Martin is a small bi-national island composed of two entities: Sint Maarten in the south (state of the Kingdom of the Netherlands) and Saint-Martin in the north (French overseas ‘Collectivité’). Our research focuses on the French region, and reconstructions and formalises various attributes, operations and sectors preceding and following the passage of the cyclone. This research highlights twelve key variables distributed within four interdependent spheres (political-administrative, economic and financial, socio-cultural and land-use planning) of Saint-Martin's vulnerabilities. This is represented and analysed schematically through an ‘influence diagram’ (ID). The research outlines the balancing or reinforcing effects of four major variables of the post-disaster period: state re-engagement, post-disaster price increases, intra-communal solidarity and updating risk prevention plans. It appears that disasters alone cannot be considered as a ‘window of opportunity’ given the weight of pre-existing structures and operating patterns. The case of Saint-Martin illustrates the inertia of a system in the face of a major event, despite strong decisions to implement disaster risk reduction and recovery.

Community resilience represents the ability of communities to use their available resources to prepare for, respond to, endure, and recover from extreme events such as floods, economic shocks and disease outbreaks. Despite a wide range of definitions and studies into community resilience, there is a lack of clarity about what community, practice and policy stakeholders understand it to represent, and how communities can practically develop such resilience. In this article, we present findings from two workshops with a range of stakeholders across communities, policy, academia and the statutory sector to gain an understanding of the current state of knowledge about community resilience to extreme events in the UK, including examples of current practice and how to collaborate better. From our workshops seven key themes about what makes communities resilient were identified: social ties and connections; experience and shared memory; leadership, engagement and shared responsibility; mind-set, collective thinking, openness to adapt and cultural change; integration, inclusivity, equity and diversity; communications, social support and co-ordination; and training and exercises and identifying local needs. How we develop resilient communities is by no means straightforward; resilience is not an outcome, rather a process (or perhaps a state of becoming?). However, this study has combined the evidence base on community resilience with qualitative inputs from a range of community, policy and academic stakeholders to provide a novel perspective on what community resilience is and how it can be developed.

This research seeks to address the extent to which indices of large-scale modes of climate variability (El Niño Southern Oscillation (ENSO) and Indian Ocean Dipole (IOD)) can be linked to physical differences in the local mean and extreme rainfall conditions experienced in the Maldives in order to suggest implications for disaster risk reduction (DRR). While some significant differences in precipitation metrics do occur at the local level between different phases of the large-scale modes of climate variability studied, they do not occur for all sites studied. While the constrained availability of historical meteorological data in the region is a limiting factor in this analysis, these findings suggest that with respect to decision-making related to extreme precipitation, ENSO/IOD forecasting may be most helpful on local scales, when supplementing an approach of on-going readiness in which communities are prepared to effectively manage hazards in any phase of the large-scale modes of climate variability studied. These conclusions are based on only precipitation; results may vary for other impacts including changing sea levels and sea surface temperatures.

Storm-related disasters lead to massive destruction of housing structures all over the world. In 2016, Fiji was struck by Cyclone Winston, which rendered approximately 15% of the country's population homeless. In light of the severe devastation brought about by the cyclone, there is a need to better prepare for future hazards, particularly in the resilience of housing structures in developing countries. A research delegation traveled to Fiji and surveyed two villages in Ra province, which were among the most severely affected by the cyclone. The field study was supplemented with an archival review of post-disaster reports and other background information obtained from key government agencies and non-government organizations working on the recovery and rehabilitation of the affected areas. Structural failure modes and patterns on damaged and collapsed houses were observed and analyzed. Results reveal the vulnerabilities of Fijian housing structures to severe winds. Inadequacies are observed in both design and construction aspects, underpinned by people's awareness of and access to cyclone-proofing practices and technologies, availability of skilled labor, and the corresponding costs. These underpinning factors would have to be addressed in order to develop a storm-resilient housing stock in Fiji.