chapter 4 - DRK

Strictly under embargo until Wednesday 22 September at 00:01 GMT (02:01 Geneva time)The focus on assets, especially higher-level indicators like economic or insured losses,as a major factor in determining disaster risk is providing a deceptive view of how disastersare actually impacting on people, especially poor households in cities. If we areto look at risk at the household level and affecting the urban poor, the types of eventsthat would seriously impact on people’s lives and their ability to recover such as assetslost, days of work and school missed, increased expenditure on food and prevalence ofsickness, we would get a different risk picture with poor urban dwellers at highest risk.More detailed understanding of urban risks is needed at two levels. First of all, at thescale of the individual city, where more data are needed such as that provided by theMANDISA database. Second, a disaggregated view of risk should also be pursued atthe urban district level as per the DesInventar model, to improve analysis of small,everyday disasters in order to better understand more subtle but important variationsin risk which, in turn, will enable more appropriate disaster risk reduction measuresto be put in place around often ‘unseen’ or unrecorded events. This can be invaluablefor urban programming and provide a full perspective on the extent of hazardsfaced by the urban poor or those living in informal settlements. Third, more precisereporting is needed at the national and international levels to understand how largescaledisasters impact on urban areas. For example, more precise information in theCRED database about the location of the event, including which urban areas theevent impacted.Chapter 2 was written by Cassidy Johnson, Development Planning Unit, Bartlett Schoolof the Built Environment, University College London with contributions from David Satterthwaite,Senior Fellow, International Institute for the Environment and Development,London, and Mark Pelling, Reader in Human Geography, King’s College London. She alsowrote Box 2.3. Box 2.1 was written by I. Sanogo and N. Ifeanyi, World Food ProgrammeFood Security Analysis Service, Rome. Box 2.2 was written by David Satterthwaite.World Disasters Report 2010 – Focus on urban risk49