Risk and priorities: comparative risk

Disaster risks are unlikely to be considered important in a community that faces much greater everyday threats of disease and food shortages - even if disaster risk is quite significant it is unlikely to compare with the risk of child mortality in a society with minimal primary health care. Villages in the hazardous mountain valleys of Northern Pakistan, regularly afflicted by floods, earthquakes and landslides, do not perceive disaster mitigation to be one of their priorities.⁷ Their priorities are protection against the greater risks of disease and irrigation failures.

By contrast, communities in much less hazardous environments, living in much less vulnerable houses, in California for example, initiate disaster mitigation programs, because relative to diseases and other risks which are very low, disasters are perceived as important. The level of disaster risk relative to other comparable risks is important in determining whether a community or an individual takes action to reduce it. The amount of resources available to invest in disaster mitigation and the value of infrastructure to be protected also determines how readily a community will carry out disaster mitigation.

As societies develop economically, disaster mitigation is likely to assume greater importance to them. Development itself can increase the likelihood of disasters. Industrial development can bring new hazards; improved health care and economic growth can cause demographic changes, migration and concentrations of population. The amount which could be lost in a disaster grows, as resources are accumulated. Better public health and improvements in other sectors are likely to reduce comparative risk levels in everyday threats, so that the risks posed by extraordinary events assume a greater significance. As societies become richer more resources can be made available to invest in some degree of protection. Protection of the development process itself becomes a disaster mitigation issue.

Development programs and developing countries are the most important arenas for disaster mitigation. Societies in transition from an agrarian to an industrialized economy will be developing an awareness of some of the new environmental risks they face, and an understanding of some of the possible means of protecting themselves from them. But at the same time, the development process has the potential to damage or destroy protection provided by traditional ways of doing things - through siting and land-use, building practice, community defences or agricultural practices. Replacing these with modern techniques may be a very costly option. Thus an appropriate risk reduction strategy for a developing country has to include an understanding of traditional risk mitigation techniques and should build on them rather than replace them.