Topic 6: Community, environment and risk description
Overview
Community and environment description and analysis is all about determining the aspects of your community and/or environment that may be affected by and interact with hazards. Some authors call this area 'vulnerability analysis', but we will distinguish between the description of the community and environment on the one hand (the subject of this topic) and the description of interaction between community, environment and hazards and description of the effects of hazards on the other (the subject of Topic 7).
Our model of the emergency risk management process in Figure 6.1 shows this.
Figure 6.1
Emergency Risk Management Process
Source: Emergency Management Australia, 2000, Emergency risk management applications guide, EMA: Canberra.
In the first section of this topic, we take up the issue of why community analysis is now considered a most important aspect of emergency management. This concept is a central theme running throughout this topic.
We then consider four major aspects that need to be taken into account when describing the characteristics of a community-demography, culture, economy and infrastructure, and illustrate these principles with a number of examples. The importance of identifying spatially the more vulnerable groups in a community is stressed.
We then examine ways in which the environment can be described in terms that are of most use to emergency managers. As you will see, we need to be acutely aware of the inter-dependence of the biological and physical world, and that the well-being of a community is very much sourced in the maintenance of a stable and quality environment.
Finally we examine how we can scope the vulnerability of our community and environment in light of hazards we have identified and descriptions of hazards, community and environment we have developed. From this we can then generate risk statements for our community based around the elements of our community that are at risk and the sources of those risks (hazards).
Learning outcomes
After completing the work for this topic, you should be able to:
- explain why community analysis is an integral part of emergency management;
- outline and apply a method based on four key community aspects for describing characteristics of a community most relevant to emergency managers;
- outline ways to describe the environment that are meaningful to emergency management.
- outline ways to analyse a community's vulnerability.
- explain the process of generating risk statements fo r a community.