Attachments
EXECUTIVE SUMMARY
This report applies the concept of risk to disaster-related displacement and quantifies human displacement risk around the world. It brings together data from several sources – notably the Global Assessment Reports (GARs), international and national disaster loss databases (EM-DAT and DesInventar) and the Internal Displacement Monitoring Centre’s (IDMC)
Global Estimates and Disaster-induced Displacement Database (DiDD).
Applying the concept of risk to disasters and displacement This study reflects an awareness of the need to see disasters as primarily social, rather than natural, phenomena. This view acknowledges the fact that humans can act and take decisions to reduce the likelihood of a disaster occurring or, at the very least, to reduce their impacts and the levels of loss and damage associated with them. Disasters are thus no longer being perceived as ‘natural’ or ‘acts of God’ but instead as something over which humans exert influence and can therefore prevent.
This reconceptualisation of disasters signifies a shift from a retrospective, post-disaster approach to an anticipatory way of thinking about and confronting disasters. This conceptual development was reflected in a public policy ob - jective: disaster risk reduction (DRR). Strengthening DRR became a global priority in the 1990s, the United Nations’ International Decade of Natural Disaster Reduction. Following the 2004 Indian Ocean Tsunami, UN Member States adopted the 2005 Hyogo Framework for Action (HFA), a ten-year plan endorsed by the UN General Assembly which aims to reduce the risk of disasters globally. The objectives codified in the HFA will be renewed at a global conference in March 2015 in Sendai, Japan, at which Member States will reaffirm their commitment to DRR. One important out - come of the HFA process is awareness that without the ability to measure disaster risk it is not possible to know if it has been reduced.
In the context of disasters, displacement includes all forced population movements resulting from the immediate threat or actual impacts of a disaster situation regardless of the length of time displaced, distance moved from place of origin and subsequent patterns of movement, including back in the place of origin or re-settlement elsewhere. Based upon existing information, and notwithstanding some notable exceptions, the vast majority of people displaced by disasters are assumed to remain within their country of residence, rather than to cross internationally recognised borders to find refuge.
Displacement is a disaster impact that is determined by the underlying vulnerability of people who are exposed to shocks or stresses. It is this combination of vulnerability and exposure to hazards that compels them to leave their homes and livelihoods just to survive. While this report focuses on the human displacement component of disasters, this is a somewhat artificial distinction – the displacement is one of several factors that combined to transform a hazard event into a disaster.