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.

ABSTRACT South Africa faces increasing levels of disaster risk. The country and citizens are exposed to a wide range of weather hazards, including drought, cyclones and severe storms that can trigger widespread hardship and devastation. The country’s extensive coastline and proximity to shipping routes present further numerous marine and coastal threats. Despite ongoing progress to extend essential services to poor urban and rural communities, large numbers of people live in conditions of chronic disaster vulnerability. They are located-in underserved, ecologically fragile or marginal areas, where they face recurrent natural and other threats that range from drought to repeated informal settlement fires. Several literature on Disaster Risk Management identifies a number of risk factors that people can be exposed to. These include: · Proximity/exposure: people who occupy or, for their livelihoods depend on areas of high hazard’s risk, · Capacities and resources: people who have limited means and capacity to mobilise them in order to increase their defences against hazard and · Disadvantaged or marginalized people: people who are vulnerable due to gender, race, ethnicity and class. The assessment and evaluation of risk to a range of hazards therefore becomes a necessity as it provides a sound basis for planning and for allocation of financial and other resources, as well as designing interventions and future mitigation activities. Valid and systematic information on disasters and their impacts has, however, not been widely available within local development programmes. More often, information pertaining to disaster risks is not available, and where it is, it is in fragmentary bits usually derived from different sources and stored in different formats. These data shortcomings have been to the obvious detriment of effective relief and mitigation, both at international, national and local municipal levels. Alexandra Township, located to the north of Johannesburg is facing a problem of a usable and comprehensive disaster data inventory. In this research report, an initial disaster inventory for Alexandra Township has been undertaken. Available data on disasters that have occurred in Alexandra Township for over the decade (1991-Aug 2005) are collected. These data are drawn from various sources including newspaper clippings, community- based records, data from the Red Cross, data from the City of Johannesburg Metropolitan Municipality and others. The beginning of such an information gathering system is a basic requirement for a coherent disaster programme. While in no way as rigorous as the data capturing methods and systems as those adopted in LA RED, South America or in MANDISA (University of Cape Town), where the disaster capturing data systems are more advanced, this report begins to illustrate some of the preliminary results that can be used to begin to develop an effective data management system for Alexandra Township. Such data also should be able to determine the detection of trends, that can begin to inform a more systematic and rigorous identification of complex disaster risks in urban settings. Some of these preliminary trends are profiled in this report.

It was 12:51pm on Tuesday the 22nd of February when a 6.2 magnitude earthquake struck the Canterbury region in New Zealand’s South Island. This earthquake devastatingly took the lives of 185 people and caused widespread damage across Christchurch and the Canterbury region. Since the February earthquake there has been 15,832 quakes in the Canterbury region. The impact of the earthquakes has resulted in ongoing social, material and political change which has shaped how everyday life is experienced. While the Christchurch earthquakes have been investigated in relation to a number of different angles and agendas, to date there has been a notable absence on how older people in Christchurch are experiencing post-disaster recovery. This PhD research attends to this omission and by drawing upon geographical scholarship on disasters and ageing to better understand the everyday experiences of post-disaster recovery for older people. This thesis identifies a lack of geographical attention to the emotional, affective and embodied experience of disaster. In response to this the thesis draws upon qualitative material collected from a six months fieldwork period to better understand the ways in which everyday life is lived out in an environment which has been social and materially altered. This thesis identifies three main interrelated themes which are productive for advancing understandings of how older people are situated in a post-disaster context. The first is that the concepts of emotion, affect and embodiment matter as they help inform how disasters are experienced and negotiated and the implication this has on various social and spatial relations. The second is that the disruption of the disaster to everyday places has implications on senses of belonging which is illustrated in highly temporal and affective dimensions. The third theme highlights the importance of recognising mundane and everyday practices as a means of coping and persisting with ongoing impacts of the disaster. This thesis argues that older people should not be seen as passive or homogenous agents in a disaster context but, in fact, are experiencing highly emotional impacts of disaster.

Disasters triggered by hazards, such as floods, earthquakes, droughts, and cyclones, pose significant impediments to sustainable development efforts in the most vulnerable and exposed countries. Mainstreaming disaster risk is hence seen as an important global agenda as reflected in the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) and the Sendai Framework for Disaster Risk Reduction (SFDRR) 2015-2030. Yet, conventional development indicators remain largely negligent of the potential setbacks that may be posed by disaster risk. This article discusses the need to reflect disaster risk in development indicators and proposes a concept disaster risk-adjusted human development index (RHDI) as an example. Globally available national-level datasets of disaster risk to public and private assets (including health, educational facilities, and private housing) is combined with an estimate of expenditure on health, education, and capital formation to construct an RHDI. The RHDI is then analyzed across various regions and HDI groups, and contrasted with other HDI variants including inequality-adjusted HDI (IHDI) and the gender-specific female HDI (FHDI) to identify groups of countries where transformational disaster risk reduction (DRR) approaches may be necessary.

It is well documented that in the aftermath of a natural or human caused disaster, certain at-risk and vulnerable populations suffer significantly more than do other population groups. As a result, Congress enacted the Post-Katrina Emergency Management Reform Act (PKEMRA) in part to address deficiencies in providing aid to vulnerable populations, though little is known if the PKEMRA has resulted as it was intended. The purpose of this phenomenological study was to assess the impact of the PKEMRA on addressing emergency preparedness deficits related to at-risk and vulnerable populations. The theoretical framework followed Howard's conceptualization of game and drama theory. The research questions focused on the extent to which the PKEMRA recommendations improved disaster lifecycle outcomes for at-risk and vulnerable groups in Orleans Parish, LA between Hurricanes Katrina in 2005 and Isaac in 2012. Data were collected through semi-structured interviews of 5 emergency managers with knowledge and experience local to Orleans Parish, LA. Interview data were systematically reviewed using inductive coding and categorized for thematic analysis. Key study findings indicated that the improvements made to family location registries, evacuation procedures, and disaster resources for these populations in Orleans Parish were not a result of the PKEMRA, but of the state and local emergency agencies without input from the federal government. This study contributes to social change by promoting greater transparency of federal programs targeting at-risk and vulnerable populations, making direct recommendations to use Orleans Parish as a relevant example to address the needs of these populations. Such a review will serve as an exportable model for similar communities across the country.

In 2011, a landslide displaced approximately six thousand people from the urbanized mountain slopes of La Paz, Bolivia. The municipal government of La Paz (GAMLP) managed the displacement by housing thousands of people in displacement camps throughout the city. By 2013, residents were attempting to return to still damaged lands. This research used participant observation and interviews with residents over eight weeks in 2013 to address the following questions: 1) What social, cultural, economic or historic factors influence the settling and then resettling of at-risk slope neighborhoods in La Paz, Bolivia? 2) What are the most pressing health needs of people who have returned to slope neighborhoods and people still living in displacement camps? The research found that the return to at-risk slope properties was supported by entrenched cultural and social meanings attached to land and home ownership. While scarcity of resources galvanized communities to pressure authorities with demonstrations and threats, it also created intra-barrio frictions that disrupted reconstruction, strained existing infrastructure capabilities and threatened to undermine community health.

The 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami killed over two hundred thousand people in the fifteen countries the tsunami struck. Amidst extensive media coverage, the New Zealand Herald published in excess of two hundred online articles focusing on the event and aftermath. Representations of death and the dead within these articles are often stereotypical and formulaic. Discourse analysis revealed that death and the dead are represented through both metaphorical images and abject descriptions on two distinct scales. Both the bodies and the characters of the dead are handled explicitly according to socially acceptable trends. The dead are also situated spatially with specific identities constructed and reported on. Utilising discourses from throughout the social sciences, analysis of online publications reveals the way perceptions of media consumers to death both inform and are informed by media producers.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Hong Kong, 2007. / Title proper from title frame. Also available in printed format.

Despite the devastation caused by environmental catastrophes, these phenomena have yet to garner significant attention as a subject of criminological inquiry. This thesis is framed by the following question: How can we problematize the notion of “natural” disaster to arrive at a criminological understanding of human culpability in the production of harm? I argue that the degree of human suffering caused by natural disasters is aggravated by imperialistic state crimes, which predispose populations to conditions of vulnerability and dependency. I substantiate this argument with an analysis of Haiti and demonstrate how its history of imperialistic exploitation by the US amounted to a pattern of state crime victimization that marginalized Haitians and, consequently, shaped their suffering from the 2010 earthquake. The story of Haiti exemplifies the relationship between the contemporary hardships of a natural disaster and the historical injustices of state crime, thus illuminating the relevance of a criminology of catastrophe. / UOIT

This Note asserts that natural disaster-affected populations have a right to call on the international community to protect basic subsistence interests where their sovereign government is unable or unwilling to do so in the wake of a catastrophic natural disaster. First, this Note situates the right to international humanitarian assistance following a natural disaster as a legitimate right under modern international human rights law, using the normative framework set out by renowned political theorist Charles Beitz. This Note then illustrates how the international humanitarian law doctrine of the Responsibility to Protect provides a clear and coherent way to operationalize the right to post-natural disaster humanitarian assistance, by providing a previously-determined structure for a definitive, yet circumstantially-flexible, determination of first- and second-level responsibilities for eligible international actors to take action in defence of this right.