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d-1 Explain the terms
1. Disaster
2. Hazard
3. Seismograph
4. Focus
Answers
Answer:
The Caribbean Disaster Mitigation Project:
Technical Assistance for Natural Disaster Management
at the Regional Scale
In October 1993, United States Agency for International Development (USAID) and the Organization of American States (OAS) began cooperation in providing technical assistance for disaster mitigation in several nations of the Wider Caribbean Region, through a five year, $5.0 million project funded by the USAID Office of Foreign Disaster Assistance (OFDA). The Caribbean Disaster Mitigation Project is designed to address specific problems of disaster mitigation:
unsafe location and construction of the built environment,
limited ability to identify hazard prone areas,
inadequate technology transfer and institutional development required for disaster mitigation,
inability of the insurance industry to adequately assess catastrophic risk,
insufficient preparedness and prevention in the non-governmental sectors, and lack of coordination with the public sector,
The CDMP addresses these problems by promoting public/private sector collaboration in disaster loss reduction, and by focusing on major issues in the disaster/development linkage in the Caribbean, such as: improving public awareness and decision-making by accurately mapping hazard prone and environmentally fragile areas; achieving sustainable development by reducing natural hazard vulnerability in existing and planned development; and better managing risk and maintaining adequate catastrophe protection for the region.
Natural disasters and their management in the Caribbean
By their location, topography and physical characteristics, the Caribbean Basin nations are subject to extreme atmospheric, hydrological and geological events. These include drought, earthquakes, fires, floods, hurricanes, landslides, volcanoes and excessive or continuous wind. While the ecological dynamics and significance to ecosystem function of these events is not fully understood, their impact on human affairs is well documented.
Since 1900 a total of 153 natural disasters have been reported for the Caribbean island nations, Suriname, Guyana and Belize (OFDA, 1989). Two-thirds of these disasters (103) were caused by tropical storms or hurricanes, with the remainder consisting of 25 floods, 10 fires, 5 volcanic eruptions and 3 earthquakes. Haiti is the country that suffered the largest number of events (25) followed closely by Jamaica, with 22. In the Caribbean, hurricanes are the most frequent and wide ranging natural disturbance, and they have been recorded as causing significant damage to human settlements as early as 1509, when Santo Domingo was destroyed. (Douglas, 1992). Earthquakes and volcanic eruptions have been responsible for the greatest loss of life during the modern history of the Caribbean (Tomblin, 1981). These extreme natural events, in and of themselves, cannot be defined as natural disasters if they do not involve significant loss of life and damage to property. Thus, an earthquake in a largely uninhabited area is merely a natural event, in contrast to an earthquake in a populated area, such as Los Angeles, California, which has caused extensive damage to public infrastructure and private dwellings, and which has caused many injuries and deaths. Hence, a natural disaster is defined not by the event, but rather by its impacts.
Human impacts in coastal areas, such as clearing of mangroves, filling of coastal wetlands, destruction of coral reefs, and mining of dune and beach sand, can contribute to the increased severity of natural disasters. In many upland areas, unregulated and unplanned agriculture and forestry has resulted in extensive erosion and subsequent sedimentation of rivers and reefs. These human impacts reduce the ability of ecosystems to dampen the impacts of storms and other natural hazards. For example, upland deforestation serves to amplify the negative effects of hurricanes, most notably by increasing the likelihood of flash flooding and landslides. These floods and landslides can subsequently impact human settlements which have been sited in vulnerable areas, or where such hazards have not been taken into account in the design and construction of dwellings and other structures.
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