disaster management masters

disaster management masters

Advancing Disaster Management: A Comprehensive Guide for Master’s Students

1. Introduction to Disaster Management

“Simple” disaster planning, as exemplified by the creation of disaster relief response teams, might well be discarded if the level of understanding necessary for comprehensive disaster management is not obtained. Concisely speaking, disaster management as a subject offers complex societal imperatives that students and others must understand before deliberation about potential roles can be rational.

Disaster management, the subject of this text, serves as an effort by groups and societies to help them make better decisions in reducing the impact of an event that has the potential to be extraordinarily painful to the individuals and organizations who experience it. Disasters force or are expected to force individuals and organizations to consider where they live, work, locate or where they establish a broad array of economic and other risk-based relationships, often with little or no insights on how events might affect these relationships.

Two invidious words—hazard and vulnerability—become operative to help shape the impact of an event. What is hazard on one hand can also be an opportunity when individuals seek advantage from it. The consequences of the World Trade Center attack, the Depression, and many other potentially debilitating events in the United States before and since exist or existed because society made them possible. Concentrating on disaster management discloses their many facets.

The September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks destroyed the World Trade Center and killed almost 3,000 people. Two “guiding” planes also killed the terrorists who flew them and other innocent passengers at the Pentagon. The impact of these events continues to be felt along with the impact of economic decline in the United States and other countries.

Disasters were once rare events in the United States. A natural disaster was an event like a flood, tornado, or earthquake that occurred somewhere far away. The concept of a technological disaster or man-made disaster was unknown. Such domestic events do bracket our history, however. Generally, we know little of problems other than what we recall from tales told by others who had encountered them at other locations.

Disaster management represents a comprehensive, integrative process that seeks to help societies prevent or mitigate the damage that is inflicted through the occurrence of crippling or extraordinarily painful events that they are exposed to. For MS students studying disaster management, the material helps to understand the context for disaster management within the United States, the options for acquiring an education, the potential for a career in disaster management, and how the material offered in this text is designed to assist those pursuing such a career.

2. Theoretical Foundations and Key Concepts

Experts working primarily within the traditional hazard area – geologists, meteorologists, and seismologists, among others – tend to focus on physical dynamics, seasonality, and other characteristics of disasters. In contrast, scholars from the broad discipline of human ecology and other social science perspectives focus on patterns of human organization – impacts on smaller social units, such as families and networks, and the effect of larger communities on nature. By necessity, strategies to reduce the impact of future disasters must take into account the interrelationship between environmental and social systems. Emergency planners must have a basic understanding of these interactions in identifying areas for special intervention. Scientists will advance the effectiveness of intervention keeps environmental and social systems in focus. To understand the roots of disaster, one must identify the underlying conditions according to the region and the culture at risk. The first historical records of environmental disasters are now lost to antiquity, many likely experienced unusually heavy co-production of wind, rain, snow, and ice that affected human communities as a single catastrophic event.

The study of hazards is typically grounded in the physical and social sciences. Understanding how hazards affect people, societies, and the environment requires that hazard experts be conversant in both human and physical characteristics of natural events. Only through a foundation in both sets of characteristics will informed assessments be possible. Complex environmental structures and dynamic social processes emerge from interrelated human-natural systems. Cyclonic winds may break dikes and flood human settlements. Droughts lead to agricultural dislocations that precipitate mass migrations. Earthquakes induce sudden impoverishment by destroying housing, disrupting water and sanitation systems, and rendering cities impassable by destroying infrastructures. (In these scenarios, a nation’s infrastructure includes those fundamental facilities, services, and installations needed for functioning of a society, such as transportation and communication systems, water and power lines, building structures, and substructures. These must always remain operational for any hazard-resilient program to be sustainable.) Landslides sever transportation links and call attention to the inadequacy of remote sensing and information systems.

3. Tools and Techniques in Disaster Risk Reduction

The DRR action model was designed to foster the taking stock of achievements of the last two decades in terms of human resources and commitment, with the objectives that DRR action would become a permanent and well-understood function at the level of heads of government of Member States, to ensure that the threat posed by natural, technological, and environmental hazards is reduced to a minimum. Only a fully committed and informed decision-maker recognizes and takes full cognizance of the catastrophic damage that natural, environmental, and technological hazards may cause in the long term and takes preventive action and adopts disaster response strategies and measures, with the aim of avoiding negatively impacting other sectors such as education, health, economic, social, and infrastructure development.

Linking disaster prevention (engineering measures, land-use planning, etc.) and disaster preparedness has evolved into disaster risk reduction (DRR), and raising long-standing prevention to the same level of importance as the immediately post-disaster work. The discipline of integrated DRR created the demand for a business process that would guide countries in the integration of long-term disaster prevention priorities and shorter-term post-disaster needs, to the end of reducing disaster risks while accelerating sustainable development progress. The disaster risk reduction action model provides for both an integrated disaster risk reduction planning process and a disaster prevention and preparedness policy that results from the integration of long-term and short-term actions at national and sectoral or regional levels.

4. Case Studies and Best Practices

Case Study In disaster management, case studies are important as they provide students with an access and understanding that could take decades, and even cost lives, to develop. It is important to learn from the experience of others and hence, case studies provide future emergency management professionals with real-life, practical consequences of policy development, and the failure to implement those policies. These real-life experiences from practice, when placed within the context of existing reports and other data, provide a substantial platform for experiential learning because of their potential to create rich, complicated, and dynamic learning opportunities. Case studies are often more accessible and memorable, as well as student-oriented learning tools. They allow students to more easily consider the linkages between policies, operational practices, and potential responses from the involved populations. By removing the cold and abstract nature of the report, they humanize the experience. While specialized and mixed with other learning resources, case studies can significantly enhance the students’ emergency management learning experiences.

Introduction You might have heard about “Disaster management” and might be wondering what it is. In simplest terms, “Disaster management” can be defined as the organization and management of responsibilities and resources in dealing with all humanitarian aspects of emergencies, in particular, preparedness, response, and recovery in order to lessen the impact of disasters. This essay is a tool that can be used for disaster management advanced learning.

5. Emerging Trends and Future Directions

There is also a level of increasing competition among programs, which has the potential to erode the quality of the program, the learning environment, and the degrees of graduates. As colleges, universities, and student funding are faced with increasing pressure to serve larger numbers of students at lower cost, it may become tempting to create “quickie” or “light” programs that serve the high demand for disaster management professionals. However, it also has the potential to erode the program quality and student learning to implement “quickie” or “lite” programs. Graduates who enter the workforce with only a superficial or fragmented education run the risk of being seen as less professionally credible or sellable in the long run. This dark future can be avoided through the collective effort of programs that produce a common body of disaster management knowledge via a formal system of needs assessments, collaborative discussions, regular curricular reviews, and with the support of professional associations to ensure that minimum standards and engaging learning environments are maintained.

Following the information outlined in this comprehensive guide, there are still emerging trends and future directions that should be considered. As educators trained in disaster management evolve to discern how best to teach students, there are key areas that they need to remain in tune with to ensure that effective learning happens. Future trends and directions in disaster management education should consider the increasing diversity among students who are flooding master’s programs. As previously mentioned, the level of diversity has the potential to enhance the classroom environment or it can become a barrier to learning. It is crucial for instructors to be informed about the pre-disaster social determinants of vulnerability that affect students who come to their programs and to avoid making assumptions about what their students bring to the classroom in terms of cognitive capacities, ability, and knowledge.