Patrick Pigeon

The Role of Knowledge in Disaster Risk Reduction

Abstract Disaster risk reduction policy and practice require knowledge for informed decision making and coordinated action. Although the knowledge production and implementation processes are critical for disaster risk reduction, these issues are seldom systematically addressed in-depth in disaster studies and policy programs. While efforts and improvements have been made with regard to data and information, only limited resources are committed to improving knowledge management structures and integrating knowledge systems at different spatial levels. The recently adopted Sendai Framework for Disaster Risk Reduction 2015–2030 addresses knowledge-related issues and provides the opportunity to highlight the critical role of knowledge in disaster risk reduction. This article presents insights into potential conceptualizations of knowledge that would advance disaster research and policy. We use cases from France to illustrate challenges of and pathways to disaster risk reduction. We suggest to further strengthen efforts that improve our understanding of the connections between disaster risk, knowledge, and learning. A better integration of multiple scales, different societal actors, various knowledge sources, and diverse disciplines into disaster risk research will increase its relevance for decision-makers in policy and practice. Well-targeted incentives and political backing will improve the coherence, coordination, and sharing of knowledge among various actors and arenas.

Contextualizing vulnerability assessment: a support to geo-risk management in central Africa

In central Africa, a combination of several types of major geo-hazards threatens the highly populated area centred on the Lake Kivu Basin and the Virunga Volcanic Province. Contributing to Disaster Risk Reduction (DRR) policies not only go through hazards mechanisms analysis, but also through vulnerability assessment. This paper stresses the methodological choices made to target vulnerability assessment in a context of scarce and unreliable data. We discuss here the various stages we have overcome and the analyses conducted at the local scale, i.e. on targeted urban sites. The cities of Bukavu and Goma (Republic Democratic of Congo) count about 800,000 inhabitants each, and catastrophic events are frequently recorded. As a result of our analysis, grounding vulnerability assessment exclusively on a general definition seems not appropriate. Relevant peculiarities of the studied area should also be taken into account in vulnerability and risk assessment. Our research contributes to increase the relevance of DRR policies for risk-exposed populations. Following, one of our main concerns will be to challenge stakeholders who have to face numerous other issues on a daily basis, such as security, land issue or resources.

Dike Risk: Revealing the Academic Links Between Disaster Risk Reduction, Sustainable Development, Climate Change, and Migration

This chapter uses the term “dike risk” to demonstrate the interrelations between sustainable development, disaster risk reduction (DRR), climate change adaptation (CCA), and migration. The relevance of “dike risk” is investigated in the French legal and institutional context and identifies how risk is transformed by dike construction. This issue is illustrated through several case studies. To analyze the above issues, this chapter is based on a conceptual framework: “the Farmer’s curve” and the concept of resilience, consistent with social-ecological systems (SES) thinking. This understanding assists us in analyzing the issues at stake and how we can gain from having a more integrated and systemic approach toward DRR and environmental related policies.

The Limits of Understanding Disasters

We come back, therefore, to the databases, the essential components of research efforts. Indeed, they make up the foundations of the knowledge that we can have about disaster risk. The expression of the database, as such, also suggests that they play a fundamental role in analyzing problems, which are here linked to the development of disasters and the associated damage. The very principle of the databases is by no means called into question as much by academic institutions as by managers involved in disaster prevention. A forum was held in Antalya in February 2015, which brought together several international institutions directly involved in disaster prevention, such as the World Meteorological Organization, the World Bank and the International Red Cross, besides several dozen researchers from more than 30 countries involved in international research programs on the same question. The Antalya Forum prepared, among other things, for the Sendai congress of March 2015, in order to review the principal framework for international action dedicated to disaster prevention. Yet, the first recommendation resulting from a week of collective reflection in Antalya, and whose concluding statement suggested six initiatives for action, displays the necessity of using a new database. Accessible by a portal, they rest on postdisaster returns on experience and on what we can learn from them.

Bridging the Gap between Disaster Prevention and Environmental Concerns

The paradox of disaster prevention policies results from numerous elements: limits linked to measurement, conceptual frameworks, analytical capacity to access knowledge, multifaceted conditioning of this knowledge and other similar factors. Furthermore, the intensification of risk concern and the proliferation of management initiatives are inseparable from an environmental issue which indeed proved to be a social issue in the second half of the 20th Century. The context of such concerns makes the social and political conditioning easier to understand in various situations. Those conditionings affect the production of knowledge around risks and also the development of policies to prevent them.

The Limits of Disaster Prevention: Returns on Management Experiences

Researchers are confronted with problems posed by the definitions and models that they use to give as much coherence and usefulness as possible to the prevention of disaster risk. However, for their part, the managers and the political decision-makers, who use the same definitions, eventually recognize the limits of actions decided in order to anticipate future damages and to reduce their intensity as much as possible. The emphasis put on limits of management equally justifies the interrogation that underlies this book. It can also receive feedback in the research and reflections on political actions. According to Myriam Revault d’Allonnes, “policy is created inasmuch as it reflects, where people make policy thinking about (and because they think) what they are doing”. The philosopher concludes that “an essential function of political activity (…) consists exactly of confronting fragility, living with it, and not by controlling it by exceeding or abolishing it”. Indeed, multiple post-disaster feedbacks, such as reflections on reconstruction, confirm on their own the impossibility of finding a fully satisfying solution (and for whom?) to the problems that disaster prevention poses. These interrogations of the limits of prevention policies are exposed at the worldwide scale. We follow this with two studies that are more specific: one about the identification of dike risk, and the other on the analysis of prevention policies carried out in Ecuador. These will show that the problems that the disaster prevention policies pose are clearly identifiable whatever the differences between the land occupations implied, as well as the scale of the analysis or the institutions and even the local actors who are involved.

The Contributions to Disaster Prevention are Difficult to Assess

Reports officially presenting disasters and their development are surprising in their overwhelmingly dominant pessimism. Indeed, there is no lack of evidence attesting that prevention policies do their job, even if they encounter numerous limits. In this second chapter, as a counterpoint to the first chapter, we will present arguments that put the pessimistic, but dominant, messages regarding prevention policies in perspective and add nuance. In the first place, not all of the statistical databases on disasters show an increase in frequency or even an increase in the average intensity of the associated damages (2.1).

The Rise in Knowledge and Policies Suggest an Increase in Disasters

It may seem entirely paradoxical that we have more and more knowledge about disasters, more prevention policies and more institutions dedicated to the latter, and yet the number of disasters and the associated damage is statistically increasing, at least in certain categories. The opposite can be true in some cases: according to the database of the association International Tanker Owners Pollution Federation (ITOPF), the frequency of major disasters associated with accidental maritime pollution and international transportation of hydrocarbons is falling. Despite these counterexamples, which we will return to, it has become more common for the bibliography to envision disaster prevention along with research on solutions to the different types of damage, which are increasing and that could even get worse in the future if they are not fundamentally better understood and managed. This is very clearly the message that is being carried by researchers and the policies concerning adaptation to climate change. For Alcoforado and Andrade, “having a better understanding of the role that urban areas play in global warming is urgent for us to combat the negative consequences of global warming and take the necessary measures to reduce its consequences or to adapt to new climactic conditions”. According to Downton, “we need towns to live, and yet they are killing us”. Such a diagnosis requires that we transform towns into “engines of survival” by developing “new types of urban ecosystems and significantly transforming our way of life in a substantial and systemic manner”. The types of adaptation to climate change, and especially their wide acceptance by social actors, are a part of the disaster prevention process. These authors, among many others, presume that if the implementation of policies for adaptation continues to encounter such large obstacles, we must expect the increase in damages associated with hydro-climatic disasters in the decades to come.

The Principle of Cognitive Limits: Its Application to Disaster Prevention

Initial light may be shed by the Discourse on Method. It establishes several principles, some of which allow us to justify why defining the notion of risk, even today, involves fragmentation into several sub-notions. For risks, it is mainly a question of hazard, exposition and vulnerability. The approach is thereby systematic.

How Can We Best Manage Disasters

Extrapolating this question further, we may ask whether it is possible to make a practical contribution to the prevention of disasters all the while taking into account the multiple and often structural conditionings that weigh on policies to do so. It has already been asked by several researchers working in conjunction with managers and policy makers. That is why we begin this chapter by addressing the practical component of the answer, which tends to have its roots in knowledge management systems. These systems (knowledge management systems, or KMS) are support tools for the assessment of disaster prevention policies, as well as decisionmaking support tools. However, they remain highly contested. Despite the continued progress in this field, they are only able to partially integrate knowledge from local players, such as citizens or households, who are likely to often challenge disaster prevention policies, as they are perceived as coming from above (“top down”). As such, local players in fact denounce part of the conditionings that frame those policies.