Conceptualizing community in disaster risk management

Community resilience is often assessed in disaster risk management (DRM) research and it has been argued that it should be strengthened for more robust DRM. However, the term community is seldom precisely defined and it can be understood in many ways. We argue that it is crucial to explore the concept of community within the context of DRM in more detail. We identify three dominating views of conceptualizing community (place-based community, interaction-based community, community of practice and interest), and discuss the relevance of these conceptualizations. We base this discussion on quantitative and qualitative empirical and policy document data regarding flood and storm risk management in Finland, wildfire risk management in Norway and volcanic risk management Iceland. According to our results, all three conceptualizations of community are visible but in differing situations. Our results emphasize the strong role of public sector in DRM in the studied countries. In disaster preparedness and response, a professionalized community of practice and interest appear to be the most prominent within all three countries. The interaction-based community of informal social networks is of less relevance, although its role is more visible in disaster response and recovery. The place-based (local) community is visible in some of the policy documents, but otherwise its role is rather limited. Finally, we argue that the measured resilience of a community depends on how the community is conceptualized and operationalized, and that the measures to strengthen resilience of a particular community should be different depending on what the focal community is.Peer reviewe

Configurations of community in flood risk management

Despite a notable increase in the literature on community resilience, the notion of 'community' remains underproblematised. This is evident within flood risk management (FRM) literature, in which the understanding and roles of communities may be acknowledged but seldom discussed in any detail. The purpose of the article is to demonstrate how community networks are configured by different actors, whose roles and responsibilities span spatial scales within the context of FRM. Accordingly, the authors analyse findings from semi-structured interviews, policy documents, and household surveys from two flood prone areas in Finnish Lapland. The analysis reveals that the ways in which authorities, civil society, and informal actors take on multiple roles are intertwined and form different types of networks. By implication, the configuration of community is fuzzy, elusive and situated, and not confined to a fixed spatiality. The authors discuss the implications of the complex nature of community for FRM specifically, and for community resilience more broadly. They conclude that an analysis of different actors across scales contributes to an understanding of the configuration of community, including community resilience, and how the meaning of community takes shape according to the differing aims of FRM in combination with differing geographical settings.Peer reviewe

The disappearance of the Karez of Turfan - Report from the project 'Harvest from wasteland - Land people and water management reforms in the drylands of Xinjiang'

Haakon Lein & Yuling Shen. 2006. The disappearance of the Karez of Turfan. Report from the project ‘Harvest from wasteland. Land, people and water management reforms in the drylands of Xinjiang.’ Acta Geographica–Trondheim, Serie A, Nr. 15. Geografisk institutt, NTNU, Trondheim. 18 pp. ISSN 1502-2390. This report has been prepared as part of the project ‘Harvest from wasteland. People, land and water management in Xinjiang, China.’ This project focuses on land and water management issues as well as ongoing water reforms in locations in the Tarim basin of Xinjiang Uyuar Autonomous Region, Northwest China. The report deals with karez irrigation in Turfan district. Karez irrigation is a type of irrigation based on underground canals and is well known in many dry areas of the Middle East and Central Asia under the name qanats. The report describes the situation today, the number of karez still in use, their importance as regards agriculture as well as to identify causes behind the decline in number of karez in use. The report is based on fieldwork in Turfan in October 2004. A major conclusion is that the karez as a unique form of irrigation is under substantial pressure and that if present development continues karez irrigation will more or less be abandoned in the region within a decade or two

Land division, conservancies, fencing and its implications in the Maasai Mara, Kenya

There is growing concern about the future of wildlife and pastoralism in the Maasai Mara as well as on the communal lands adjacent to the national reserve that serves as home to pastoral communities and wildlife dispersal areas. Of particular concern over the last years has been the increasing threat of fencing of what once was an open landscape. Although there are studies that have documented the increase of fencing and its possible effects, a thorough investigation into what provoked such a move by local communities is lacking. In this paper, we set out to investigate the causes that lead to the enclosure of what once was communal areas and the now increasing fencing of individually owned plots of land. We use empirical data from ethnographic fieldwork in villages adjacent to the Maasai Mara involving interviews, participant observation as well as analysis of documents such as conservation plans, reports, government legal acts and websites. We argue that the history of group ranches, processes of land division, the establishment of conservancies and the transformation of land into a tradable commodity can largely explain the processes of fencing taking place today. We conclude that in the long run the processes of fencing is not compatible with traditional pastoralist practices and may lead to further marginalisation of already vulnerable pastoral communities. By reducing mobility, fencing undermines pastoralism, which still is the mainstay of many households in Maasai Mara

Quantifying vulnerability to flooding induced by climate change: The case of Verdal, Norway

The article presents a methodology for the measurement of exposure and social vulnerability to hazards at local level. Using the small town of Verdal in central Norway as a case study, the authors examine its vulnerability to flooding induced by climate change both at present and its potential vulnerability in the future. Data on river and surge flooding and sea level rise scenarios, which are overlapped spatially with present-day maps for land use, transport networks, and buildings, are used to assess exposure to flooding. In addition, the authors assess the study area's level of social vulnerability. The two measures are then combined to assess the integrated vulnerability for Verdal. The results of the analysis show that there are considerable differences across the study area regarding which statistical units (subdivisions of the municipality) will experience the largest increases in vulnerability. The methodology used in the study is transferrable to other towns and municipalities, as well as to other types of hazards, both natural and man-made

The role of personal experiences in Norwegian perceptions of climate change

Abstract It is commonly assumed that personal experiences of a changing climate will influence people’s attitudes to the extent that they will be more likely to acknowledge anthropogenic climate change as a real threat and therefore be more willing to accept both mitigation and adaptation efforts. In the article, the authors examine how survey participants’ personal experiences of extreme events and climate-related changes in the natural environment influenced their perceptions of climate change. Using data from a nationally representative survey conducted in Norway in 2015 and the results of logistic regressions, the authors find that individual observations of changes in nature were linked to higher levels of concern with regard to climate change, as well as to attitudes that were more positive towards personal mitigation and adaption efforts. Somewhat counter-intuitively, they also find that participants who had personally experienced a natural hazard event were less concerned about climate change compared with participants without such experiences. The authors conclude that personal experience of the consequences of climate change may in some cases have a limited effect on enhancing people’s concerns about climate change

Climate change, natural hazards, and risk perception: the role of proximity and personal experience

Understanding public risk perception related to possible consequences of climate change is of paramount importance. Not only does risk perception have an important role in shaping climate policy, it is also central in generating support for initiatives for adaptation and mitigation. In order to influence public knowledge and opinion, there is a need to know more about why people have diverging attitudes and perceptions related to climate change and its possible consequences. By using representative survey data for Norway and multivariate analysis, the authors of this article show that differences in attitudes and perceptions are partially explained by factors such as gender, educational background, and people's political preferences. However, an important factor explaining people's perception of climate change and its possible consequences is their direct personal experience of damage caused by climate-related events such as flooding or landslide. Furthermore, the results show that personal experience of damage has the largest impact on the respondents' belief that there will be more natural-resource hazards locally than in Norway or globally. The results also show that merely living in a more exposed area but not having a personal experience of damage does not affect the respondents' concern towards climate change

Anthropogenic drivers of forest change in Miombo ecosystems

As the basic purpose of REDD+ is to avoid deforestation and forest degradation, a good understanding of processes that cause deforestation is obviously of importance. However, many REDD+ programs and policies have rather limited focus on the underlying processes behind forest change. Much of the on-going work within the REDD+ framework focus on building institutional capacity (‘REDD readiness'), finding ways or measuring and monitoring carbon, developing institutional facilities, and on the international financing of REDD+. It appears that the discussion of what actually causes deforestation is seen as a more or less resolved and settled issue. This paper argues for a more contextualized understanding of the drivers of forest change in human-dominated Miombo ecosystems of southern Tanzania. This is achieved through addressing two basic empirical research questions: How is the forest changing; and what factors influence forest change? The study is based on quantitative and qualitative data covering both socio-economic and ecological aspects collected in 12 villages of Kilwa and Lindi districts in southern Tanzania. The study shows that there are considerable micro-level variations from village to village as regard both the extent and drivers of deforestation/forest degradation