Policy Analysis for Natural Hazards: Some Cautionary Lessons From Environmental Policy Analysis

How should agencies and legislatures evaluate possible policies to mitigate the impacts of earthquakes, floods, hurricanes and other natural hazards? In particular, should governmental bodies adopt the sorts of policy-analytic and risk assessment techniques that are widely used in the area of environmental hazards (chemical toxins and radiation)? Environmental hazards policy analysis regularly employs proxy tests, in particular tests of technological feasibility, rather than focusing on a policy\u27s impact on well-being. When human welfare does enter the analysis, particular aspects of well-being, such as health and safety, are often given priority over others. Individual risk tests and other features of environmental policy analysis sometimes make policy choice fairly insensitive to the size of the exposed population. Seemingly arbitrary numerical cutoffs, such as the one-in-one million incremental risk level, help structure policy evaluation. Risk assessment techniques are often deterministic rather than probabilistic, and in estimating point values often rely on conservative rather than central-tendency estimates. The Article argues that these sorts of features of environmental policy analysis may be justifiable, but only on institutional grounds-if they sufficiently reduce decision costs or bureaucratic error or shirking-and should not be reflexively adopted by natural hazards policymakers. Absent persuasive. institutional justification, natural hazards policy analysis should be welfare-focused, multidimensional, and sensitive to population size, and natural hazards risk assessment techniques should provide information suitable for policy-analytic techniques of this sort

Policy Analysis for Natural Hazards: Some Cautionary Lessons From Environmental Policy Analysis

How should agencies and legislatures evaluate possible policies to mitigate the impacts of earthquakes, floods, hurricanes and other natural hazards? In particular, should governmental bodies adopt the sorts of policy-analytic and risk assessment techniques that are widely used in the area of environmental hazards (chemical toxins and radiation)? Environmental hazards policy analysis regularly employs proxy tests, in particular tests of technological feasibility, rather than focusing on a policy\u27s impact on well-being. When human welfare does enter the analysis, particular aspects of well-being, such as health and safety, are often given priority over others. Individual risk tests and other features of environmental policy analysis sometimes make policy choice fairly insensitive to the size of the exposed population. Seemingly arbitrary numerical cutoffs, such as the one-in-one million incremental risk level, help structure policy evaluation. Risk assessment techniques are often deterministic rather than probabilistic, and in estimating point values often rely on conservative rather than central-tendency estimates. The Article argues that these sorts of features of environmental policy analysis may be justifiable, but only on institutional grounds-if they sufficiently reduce decision costs or bureaucratic error or shirking-and should not be reflexively adopted by natural hazards policymakers. Absent persuasive. institutional justification, natural hazards policy analysis should be welfare-focused, multidimensional, and sensitive to population size, and natural hazards risk assessment techniques should provide information suitable for policy-analytic techniques of this sort

Linking space syntax and cluster analysis to design and plan temporary housing neighborhoods: A taxonomy of sites in Norcia

Building Back Better in disaster recovery and reconstruction requires the adoption of integrated and context-sensitive approaches to the design and planning of Temporary Housing (TH) sites. However, there is a lack of methods for enabling successful outcomes in housing assistance provision, e.g. via a quantitative evaluation of the social-spatial qualities of the sites, and supporting the negotiation of urban design changes and the development of a coherent end-of-life plan. The paper aims to uncover formal analogies between different TH sites’ layouts by linking Space Syntax and Clustering analysis within an unsupervised machine-learning pipeline, which can consider a virtually unlimited number of configurational qualities and how they vary across different scales. The potential benefits of the proposal are illustrated through its application to the study of 20 TH sites built in Norcia after the 2016-2017 Central Italy earthquakes. The results indicate the proposal enables distinguishing different types of spatial arrangements according to local strategic priorities and suggest the opportunity to extend the study in the future to set up rules of thumb for the design of site layout options. The paper ultimately aims to equip local administrations and contracted professionals with a much-needed tool to develop and rapidly audit proposals for temporary neighbourhoods oriented at enhancing the resilience of disaster-affected towns both in the medium and in the long term

Using Case Work as a Pretest to Measure Crisis Leadership Preparedness

Today’s leaders must thrive in a world of turbulence and constant change. Unstable conditions frequently generate crises, emphasizing the need for crisis leadership preparedness, which is missing from many business curricula. Thus, the purpose of this work was to develop a learning module in crisis leadership preparedness. As a baseline measure or pretest, 217 graduate students were asked to analyze two crisis leadership cases during the first week of an entry leadership class. Content analysis provided the method to identify where student analyses fell short. These gaps in learning then informed the creation of student learning objectives. Applying inquiry-based learning, I then suggest instructional methods that I incorporated into an active learning module to better prepare today’s leaders for crisis leadership

A Serious Game: Defying Disaster Earthquake

The tremendous growth in the serious games market presents the opportunity to help people learn through playing games. Defying Disaster is a 2D side scroller serious game designed to teach people how to prepare for and handle an earthquake. Players do a series of mini games that provide earthquake survival tips while interacting with a larger world after an earthquake disaster. An evaluation with thirty people compared learning disaster knowledge through reading materials versus playing games. The results show people learn better through playing Defying Disaster than reading materials

Defying Disaster: Earthquake

The tremendous growth in the serious games market presents the opportunity to help people learn through playing games. Defying Disaster is a 2D side scroller serious game designed to teach people how to prepare for and handle an earthquake. Players do a series of mini games that provide earthquake survival tips while interacting with a larger world after an earthquake disaster. An evaluation with thirty people compared learning disaster knowledge through reading materials versus playing games. The results show people learn better through playing Defying Disaster than reading materials

Defying Disaster

The tremendous growth in the serious games market presents the opportunity to help people learn through playing games. Defying Disaster is a 2D side scroller serious game designed to teach people how to prepare for and handle an earthquake. Players do a series of mini games that provide earthquake survival tips while interacting with a larger world after an earthquake disaster. An evaluation with thirty people compared learning disaster knowledge through reading materials versus playing games. The results show people learn better through playing Defying Disaster than reading materials

Ruin-naissance

Ruin-naissance is the term I use to describe not only the resurrection of an archeological site, but also the rebirth of an idea about how we think about ruins and how new construction can enhance the experience of these kinds of sites. The principle contention of this thesis is that a better understanding of the fragmented evidence presented by an archeological site can be seen through the lens of a contemporary architectural intervention that responds sensitively to an ancient site. In doing this, the intervention needs to address issues of identity, narrative and historiography. The new architecture should not ignore or in any way obscure the existence of ruins. Rather, the new architecture should treat the ruins as part of the design, where their integration is essential not only as objects or space, but also as a teaching device of history

SPATIAL PLANNING BASED ON LOCAL WISDOM IN THE SAMBORI INDIGENOUS COMMUNITY THROUGH MANAGEMENT OF ETNO TOURISM POTENTIAL

The development of the population, which is accompanied by an increase in human needs invarious aspects, causes various spatial problems. Spatial problems include settlements andunhealthy community environments such as slums, prone to floods, droughts, fires, pollution anddamage to the environment, joblessness, and the spread of various diseases. Therefore, it isnecessary to have a spatial arrangement that is in accordance with the needs and capacity of thespace, so that a beautiful, cool and harmonious life can be achieved. Basically, the concept ofspatial planning, ideally, has long been known by elements of Indonesian society, even beforethe explosion of population growth that occurs today. The existence of sacred spaces, areas, andland that are not allowed to build houses, residential areas in groups, areas for graves, areas forroads, areas for places of worship, agricultural areas, are forms of local spatial planning knownto the general public. Local wisdom is one of the community's capital to combine aspects ofnature conservation with aspects of economic fulfillment which is conceptualized as Ethnotourism. One of the potentials that many regions have in Indonesia is the natural potential whichbecause of its beauty and uniqueness can be developed for Ethno tourism. A very closecorrelation between local wisdom and ecotourism is that the local wisdom of a particularcommunity is usually related to the way it relates to the environment and the naturalsurroundings. The interaction of this wisdom is a very good attraction to be packaged into aunique ecotourism concept. Based on the conceptual description of the analysis and the empiricalconditions. It seems that the implementation of local spatial planning is one of the mostfundamental alternatives to be presented in a scientific format so that we can understand moredeeply the spatial concept built by our ancestors. Moreover, in the era of globalization whichpresents a very strong influence on all dimensions of life, including spatial planning, thusrequiring us to have a strong foundation in managing space as a place to live and develop. This iswhere local values in managing spatial planning are needed to strengthen the identity andindependence of the Indonesian nation. One of the villages in the Bima Regency that is able tomaintain the traditions and local values of the Indonesian people's spatial planning is theSambori Traditional Village community. The Sambori community has used a spatial plan that isvery in line with the values and spatial patterns in ecotourism management that is rational and inaccordance with its ideal designation