Tectonics- Measuring Hazards, Vunerability, Hazard Profiles & Governance Flashcards
What’s a disaster
A serious disruption of the functioning of a community or a society, causing widespread human, material, economic or environmental losses which exceed the ability of the affected community or society to cope using its own resources.
What’s vulnerability
The characteristics of a person or group in terms of their capacity to anticipate, cope with, resist and recover from the impact of a natural hazard. The conditions which determine these characteristics as physical, social, economic and environmental factors which increase the susceptibility of a community to the impact of hazards.
What’s risk
The probability of loss resulting from the interaction of a hazard and a vulnerability.
Disaster risk equation
Risk = hazard X vulnerability / capacity to cope
What’s resilience
A measure of community’s ability to absorb and recover from the occurrence of a hazardous event.
3 scales to measure earthquakes
The richter, mercalli & moment magnitude scale
What’s the Richter scale
A scale which measures the magnitude of an earthquake. Seismographs record a zig-zag trace that shows the varying amplitude of ground oscillations beneath the instrument. Magnitude is expressed as whole numbers on this scale.
What’s the mercalli scale
A behavioural type classification of the resulting damage caused by earthquakes, helps to draw picture of the impacts along a transept from the epicentre.
What’s the moment magnitude scale
Developed in the 1970s, and it accounts for types of seismic waves at various frequencies. It’s able to estimate the total energy of earthquakes, and can also relate these observations to the physical features of a fault.
What’s a hazard profile
It’s a description and analysis of a specific type of local hazard, it’s performed for each hazard and based off to criteria, such as frequency, duration, and speed of onset.
Examples of primary and secondary hazards
P= earthquakes, floods and wildfires
S= landslides, tsunamis and other human caused hazards
Challenges with hazard profiling
Difficult to compare an earthquake to a flood to a volcanic eruption as they all have different impacts on society and have varying spatial and temporal distributions. In order to accurately rank multiple hazards on one scale, certain elements of the hazard become inaccurately displayed or simply left out.
What’s governance
It’s the exercise of political, economic and administrative authority in the management of a country’s affairs at all levels. It comprises mechanisms, processes and institutions through which citizens and groups articulate their interests, exercise their legal rights, meet their obligations, and mediate their differences.
Haiti is an example of bad governance, Haitian government are corrupt, so money Haiti is given isn’t spent well as there’s no coordination.
What’s mitigation
Reducing the impact of a problem
What’s spatial predictability
The extent to which the location of a hazard can be know in advance; this is generally easy for a volcano but less so along fault lines.
