After the United Nations General Assembly requested a day to foster a global culture of risk awareness and catastrophe mitigation, the International Day for Disaster Reduction was established in 1989. Every year on October 13, the day honours the ways in which people and communities around the world are lowering their risk of being affected by catastrophes and increasing awareness of the value of limiting the dangers they face. The subject of this year’s International Day for Catastrophe Risk Reduction on October 13 is “International collaboration for developing countries” to lower their disaster risk and disaster losses. The sixth Sendai Seven target is this one. When it comes to carrying out the policy agenda decided in 2015, the year 2021 is expected to be a make-or-break year. Extreme weather occurrences will be overpowering in the next ten years if genuine climate action is not taken, especially for developing nations.
Disasters have a disproportionately negative effect on low- and middle-income countries, especially in terms of death, the number of injured, displaced, and homeless people, economic losses (as a percentage of GDP), and damage to vital infrastructure. If we don’t increase our efforts in catastrophe risk reduction, we won’t be able to end poverty and hunger. To increase disaster resilience in the face of extreme weather events and other natural and man-made dangers, international collaboration for developing nations through Official Development Aid (ODA) and capacity building is crucial. Disasters have always been the outcome of interactions between humans and other living things, technology, and the natural world. The way we live our daily lives is constantly impacted by many forms of disasters, which might be immediate, unanticipated, or slow-moving. As creative creatures, humans have looked for novel ways to lessen the devastation caused by disasters. However, since many years, people have reacted to calamities in a reactionary manner. Communities would wait in expectation of a tragic event and then activate plans and processes, sometimes cognizant of the hazards they face. Human social and economic progress has also increased vulnerability, which has made it harder for people to withstand disasters and their impacts. Hazards (natural or human), vulnerability to a hazard, and coping capability related to the reduction, mitigation, and resilience to the vulnerability of a community associated with the hazard in question can all be used to estimate disaster risk. Consider, for illustration, that we are dealing with an underdeveloped African village. Poor groups are compelled by certain socioeconomic and political factors in the nation to relocate in risky environments (e.g., distance from employment opportunities, urbanisation, poor land use planning etc.). When a major flood occurs, for example, a community that has settled there is vulnerable to the point of facing a calamity. This, however, shouldn’t be considered a natural calamity. Although a natural danger served as the disaster’s catalyst, it was actually man-made. This “natural calamity” may have been lessened if there had been adequate settlement planning, land use planning, building codes, community awareness, economic policies, and the like. Almost all-natural vulnerability and exposure can be decreased. Natural dangers become natural disasters as a result of human activity. It is important to keep in mind that people do not have an infinite capacity and that major losses from natural disasters have already occurred and will continue to occur in the future. We must nevertheless recognise that we also possess the ability to implement the proper actions, make the correct decisions, and engage in intelligent development planning, all of which will lower the likelihood that disasters will occur.
Therefore, preventing a risk from materialising into a disaster necessitates a very broad multi-sectoral and multidisciplinary focus where structural engineers, politicians, social workers, agricultural extension agents, and even kindergarten teachers all play equally important roles in making sure that natural hazards do not materialise into disasters.
Edu world insists awareness and safety to protect the society from turning calamities into disasters. A hazard’s effects on society lead to a disaster. Therefore, the severity of a community’s hazard vulnerability determines the effects of a disaster. The physical, social, economic, cultural, political, and even psychological forces that form people’s lives and the settings in which they live are responsible for this vulnerability, which is not a natural state.
