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Comment on A better climate for disaster risk management by Steve Milesworthy

“Climate information that can be acted upon is best created in dialogue between the users and providers, and partnerships between climate scientists and disaster risk managers should promote knowledge sharing, trust, and the development of innovative solutions.”

While this may be stating the b***din’ obvious, what does one do when the “user” group do not have any “disaster risk managers” amongst them. Representatives of local people in a given country or region may have local expertise in potential risks, but that doesn’t really turn them into a “risk manager”.

In creating the dialogue, then, there may initially be a tension between assessing real risk (that determined by careful calculation of the odds of certain events) and perceived risks (that determined, perhaps, by which particular 100-year events have happened within the past 10 years, or which events have particularly impacted the local representative’s family or ethnic group).

The problem comes if, in creating this dialogue, any mistakes made, say choosing the wrong local people, highlighting a risk that is not a real risk and so forth, can be used to criticise the whole process (“such and such person from Elbonia was not selected based on their expertise, but for reasons of political correctness” etc.)


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