Why analyse the community and the environment?
The whole purpose of analysing hazards within a risk assessment is to describe the effects of hazards in order to develop strategies for protecting the community. Just analysing and describing hazards can be a fascinating study in its own right, but in order to produce results that save life and property and protect the environment you need a knowledge of the community. Without a knowledge of what the community actually is, it is impossible to describe fully the likely effects hazards may have, and thus develop appropriate strategies to manage the risks faced.
This step of the emergency risk assessment process has evolved in only recent years. It has been traditional for the study of accidents, emergencies and disasters to be divided into three areas:
- the hazard (studied by geographers, engineers, or occupational health and safety workers);
- the social or environmental impacts of emergencies (studied by sociologists, psychologists, social workers and environmental scholars);
- the emergency (studied by emergency planners and responders).
It is necessary to merge the fruits of work in all of these disciplines in order to get the best result, that is really effective and appropriate emergency management strategies. This is why the risk assessment process we teach in this subject combines the analysis of the physical aspects of hazards, with an analysis of social and environmental effects, and leads on to the development of emergency management strategies (which is covered in EMG103).
There is a trap here, however. The community and environment need only be analysed to the depth and breadth required for emergency management purposes-a complete and comprehensive description of the community and environment is not necessary. There is an enormous amount of data available on a myriad of aspects of the community and the environment, but you will only need to examine some of this data. The difficulty in community and environmental analysis is often determining which data is relevant, and how far you should go in your analysis.
The solution to this problem of 'where do I stop gathering data and analysing it', is to perform a broad overview of the data available, see which aspects are more relevant than others, then describe the relevant aspects in more detail.