Disaster management (Vulnerability and Capacity Assessment) Essay

Disaster management (Vulnerability and Capacity Assessment) - Essay Example As the urban areas increase in size, the likelihood of occurrence of damage and a level of exposure in buildings and infrastructure increase. Such that even the occurrence of a low intensity event often results in devastating damages up to the national level, especially when they occur close to urban centres. Thus it is understood that beyond the magnitude of their impact, it is the inability of the system to respond appropriately which complicates the problem. The issues faced while undertaking relief and rescue operations for the aforementioned situations owing to regional bottlenecks are the other set of factors that need to be understood for better disaster preparedness. One answer might be techniques like Vulnerability and Capacity Analysis (VCA). The VCA is used for identification and quantification of vulnerability, while also measuring the regional capabilities. As a result of the VCA, the programme has been widely accepted to ensure that risks to vulnerable people are reduced. However, despite of its growing use, it is still not factored systematically into development project planning processes resulting a feeling of ambiguousness toward the system and limitation of its use. In this paper, the main conceptual and practical challenges in carrying out Vulnerabilities and Capacities Assessment and Analysis (VCA) are identified and corresponding solutions are suggested to overcome those challenges. Among the various methods often adopted for undertaking the VCA process, the participatory methods have had considerable success when compared to other means of identifying the exact factors involved in most issues. Figure 1 shows a range of participatory research methods that involve the mixture of well-known social science methods and other visualized methods. When disaster strikes a region, the impact of these events is borne by the entire population and hence, the vulnerability within entire cross section of the