Droughts in East Africa and India, floods in South Asia and hurricanes in the United States and Caribbean, forest fires in Canada and Australia. Disasters have repeatedly hit people all over the world in the past year.
About 1.5 million people have died in disasters in the last 20 years. Experts warned against solely blaming nature for disasters. Ilan Kelman, a disaster reduction expert from University College London, said that “language is powerful, and calling a disaster ‘natural’ risks deterring people and governments from action”. Often shocks – such as from earthquakes – could be prevented from becoming disasters by ensuring housing is resilient, for instance. Charles Parrack, an architecture expert from Oxford Brookes University, said that about 80 percent of people around the world rebuild their homes themselves after a disaster rather than relying on aid. “Perhaps that’s where we should be focusing our efforts” to make recovery efforts more effective, he said.
According to Jennifer Leaning, director of Harvard University’s FXB Center for Health and Human Rights,“In the past 20 years we’ve learned a great deal about pandemics, for example, but not enough about how to build a robust enough system to respond to them. During West Africa’s Ebola outbreak, which started in 2014, for example, better use of technology could have contained the disease, she believes. Knowledge and research on disasters needs to be organised in a way that is attuned to affected communities
About 1.5 million people have died in disasters in the last 20 years. Experts warned against solely blaming nature for disasters. Ilan Kelman, a disaster reduction expert from University College London, said that “language is powerful, and calling a disaster ‘natural’ risks deterring people and governments from action”. Often shocks – such as from earthquakes – could be prevented from becoming disasters by ensuring housing is resilient, for instance. Charles Parrack, an architecture expert from Oxford Brookes University, said that about 80 percent of people around the world rebuild their homes themselves after a disaster rather than relying on aid. “Perhaps that’s where we should be focusing our efforts” to make recovery efforts more effective, he said.
According to Jennifer Leaning, director of Harvard University’s FXB Center for Health and Human Rights,“In the past 20 years we’ve learned a great deal about pandemics, for example, but not enough about how to build a robust enough system to respond to them. During West Africa’s Ebola outbreak, which started in 2014, for example, better use of technology could have contained the disease, she believes. Knowledge and research on disasters needs to be organised in a way that is attuned to affected communities
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