Masters in Public Administration - MPA / The occurrence of disasters around the world has in the past few decades increased at an alarming rate, which has necessitated an urgent need for mitigation strategies. As part of its planning and precautionary measures in responding to disasters, the City of Cape Town(CoCT) established a Disaster Risk Management Centre (DRMC) to co-ordinate such occurrences. This study is focused on investigating to what extent the CoCT’s DRMC has prepared individuals and communities to stay resilient.South Africa lies within a region of Southern Africa that has a semi-arid to arid climate,thereby making most parts of the country vulnerable to numerous disasters. Given the prevalence of the localised disasters in the country, they have the potential to overwhelm the capacity of any affected community. Furthermore, in 2011, the CoCT was approached by the International Council for Local Environmental Initiatives(ICLEI) to sign up as a Role Model City for the “Making Cities Resilient--My City is Getting Ready’’ Campaign, in collaboration with UNISDR. It became the first in South African City to be granted “Role Model City’’ status, becoming the second African city to be designated as a ‘‘Role Model City’’.The findings of this study indicate that the CoCT, through its DRMC, has tried to heighten awareness in communities to prepare them against disasters. Another important finding is that there is inadequate involvement of communities in CoCT training programmes. Poorer communities, which are mostly affected by disasters, barely receive any form of capacity building, that is, through training. In addition, the language of communication used in brochures, leaflets and other forms of media is mostly in English and Afrikaans, while the majority of people living in informal settlements speak isiXhosa. The study provides an insight into the need to consolidate strategies to address disaster management

Bakgrund: Få donationer sker i Sverige idag, det kan därför vara svårt att erhålla och upprätthålla professionell kompetens. Forskning har visat på en uppfattning att potentiella donatorer ibland förbises på grund av organisationsmässiga brister i struktur och riktlinjer. Även bristande kunskap och ett behov av mer utbildning finns beskrivet i flertal studier. Syfte: Att undersöka hur intensivvårdssjuksköterskor uppfattar sin kunskap och beredskap gällande organdonationsprocessen. Metod: Studien var empirisk med kvalitativ ansats. En fokusgruppintervju genomfördes som datainsamling, urvalet bestod av intensivvårdssjuksköterskor som var verksamma på en allmän intensivvårdsavdelning. Innehållsanalys användes för att bearbeta materialet. Resultat: I resultatet framkom fyra huvudkategorier och nio subkategorier. Huvudkategorierna bestod av begränsad erfarenhet, förhållningssätt och bemötande, stöd från omgivningen samt befintlig kunskap och beredskap. Slutsats: Deltagarna föreföll känna trygghet i att den kunskap och beredskap som fanns på enheten som helhet räckte till även om den inte fanns specifikt hos den enskilde. Stöd fanns från kollegor och organisationen. Ett behov av mer kunskap och praktisk erfarenhet antyddes. Att ha reflekterat över det egna förhållningssättet framkom som en del i beredskapen. Klinisk betydelse: En antydan ges om vissa kunskapsluckor vilket skulle kunna beaktas vid introduktion av nyutexaminerade. Studien visar på att tillfällen till praktisk erfarenhet är få vilket betonar vikten av att regelbundet erbjuda kurser och utbildningar för att stärka intensivvårdssjuksköterskan i sin profession. / Background: Few cases of organ donations occur in Sweden today. Therefore it may be difficult to obtain and maintain professional competence. Research has shown perceptions that potential donors may be missed due to organizational weaknesses such as structure and guidelines. Past research has also unveiled lack of knowledge and a need for education. Aim: To examine how intensive care nurses perceive their knowledge and preparedness regarding the process of organ donation. Methods: An empirical qualitative approach was used. The data collection was conducted through the mean of a focus group interview. The sample consisted of intensive care nurses working in a general intensive care unit. Content analysis was used to process the material. Results: Four main categories and nine subcategories were identified. The main categories were limited experience, approach and attitude, the support of colleagues and existing knowledge and preparedness Conclusions: The participants appeared secure about the knowledge and preparedness that existed in the unit. It was considered as sufficient even if it wasn’t possessed at the individual level. Support from colleagues and organization was available, however a need for more knowledge and practical experience was expressed. Self-reflection about personal attitudes emerged as a part of the preparedness. Relevance to clinical practice: It is suspected that some knowledge gaps exist and an introduction to newly graduates about the issue should be made. The study shows that opportunities for practical experience are few which emphasize the importance of providing intensive care nurses with continuing education about the issue in order to strengthen their professionalism.

Approximately 43% of Canada’s population reside in urban centres at most seismic risk.This research creates practical and proactive tools to support decision making in emergency management regarding earthquake risk. This proactive approach evaluates the potential impact of future earthquakes for informed mitigation and preparedness decisions. The overall aims are to evaluate a community’s operational readiness, reveal limitations and resources gaps in the emergency plan, test potential mitigation and preparedness strategies and provide a realistic earthquake scenario for training activities. Two models, the CanRisk injury model and a disaster Spatial Decision Support System (SDSS), were designed and developed to further evaluate seismic risk on a community scale. The injury model is an extension of the engineering-based CanRisk tool and quantifies an individual’s risk to injury, the number of injuries, and provides an injury profile of life-threatening injuries at the building scale. The model implements fuzzy synthetic evaluation to quantify seismic risk, mathematical calculations to estimate number of injuries, and a decision-matrix to generate the injury profile. The SDSS is an evidence-based model that is designed for the planning phase to evaluate post-earthquake emergency response. Loss estimations from Hazus Canada and the CanRisk injury model are combined with community geospatial data to simulate post-earthquake conditions that are important for immediate post-earthquake response. Fire services, search and rescue operations (including urban search and rescue and police services), emergency medical services, and relief operations are all modelled. A case study was applied to 27 neighbourhoods in Ottawa, Canada, using a M6.0 and M7.25 scenarios. The models revealed challenges to all emergency response units. A critical threshold exists between the M6.0 and M7.25 scenarios whereby emergency response moves from partial but manageable functionality to a complete system breakdown. The models developed in this research show great utility to emergency managers in Canada.

To increase disaster preparedness in immigrants, risk communication and management need to be tailored to their needs and concerns. To this end, research needs to uncover how immigrants construe natural disaster risks and issues in the context of the receiving community’s social environment, and how their experiences compared to the general population. The goal of this thesis was to understand how risk perception and the social environment relate to immigrants and Canadian-born individuals’ disaster preparedness. The relationship between risk perception and disaster preparedness was investigated in the first study. Analyses of the data from a national survey revealed that both groups shared three core risk perception dimensions: external responsibility for disaster management, self-preparedness responsibility, and illusiveness of preparedness. However, they differed in the salience of five risk perception beliefs. For both groups, external responsibility for disaster management and self-preparedness responsibility were positively associated with preparedness behaviours, whereas illusiveness of preparedness was negatively related to preparedness behaviours. In the second study, the relationship between community social capital and individuals’ preparedness behaviours was investigated. Analyses of two conceptually-linked national surveys revealed that neighbourhood contact and societal trust predicted during-disaster preparedness behaviours in both groups. Interestingly, societal trust positively predicted emergency planning in Canadian-born individuals but the reverse was true for immigrants. To provide a comprehensive social-ecological perspective, twenty-two individual interviews were conducted to explore immigrants and Canadian-born individuals’ lived experiences of natural disaster risks and issues. A unifying thread across five emergent themes showed that individuals did not perceive natural disaster risks as a valid threat and disaster preparedness as relevant to their daily lives because they believed that the positive social environment in Canada would mitigate the risks. For immigrants, the immigrant condition and culture shaped how they construed natural disaster risks and issues. Overall, findings suggest that risk communication and management need to focus on building human capital and social capital, use an all-of-society engagement approach, and reframe all-hazards preparedness as relevant for daily stressors. Specific for immigrants, disaster initiatives need to be tailored to the timeline of experience of being an immigrant within the context of their receiving communities.

Masters in Public Administration - MPA / The problem question of this study is how the City of Cape Town, as a metro municipality went about implementing Disaster Risk Assessments. While the National Disaster Management Centre acknowledges that municipalities are battling to perform Disaster Risk Assessments. Understanding what was done, by whom and when will aid in the understanding of implementing Disaster Risk Assessments. Uncovering the prospects and challenges they faced and will help shed light on the guidance that is required by other municipalities, although this study’s inference is limited by the methodology. The relatively new Disaster Management Act requires a shift from old civil defence legislation to a proactive disaster risk reduction mode, with new institutional arrangements. The shift to a proactive disaster risk reduction approach required by the new legislation cannot be achieved without firstly implementing these new institutional and policy arrangements and secondly, implementing this first and vital step in the disaster risk reduction process namely, Disaster Risk Assessments. The study also seeks to understand in the community was involved. This is a qualitative study, i.e. it contains descriptive statistics and narratives. It used questionnaires to provide numerical and descriptive data to measure compliance to the Disaster Management Act in terms of the institutional arrangements implemented by the City of Cape Town. Secondly, qualitative data was collected through semi-structured interviews to provide data to understand the challenges and prospects encountered in performing Disaster Risk Assessments. A literature review was also undertaken to highlight the current debates in Disaster Risk Reduction. The stratified sample was from the officials employed at the City’s Disaster Management Centre, Area Managers, NGOs, Ward Councillors and Consultants. The data was collated and the analysed. The objective is to primarily understand what was done, by whom, when and secondly to understand the prospects and challenges faced. The findings, recommendations and areas of future study are captured in this research report.

The world is facing an increase in natural disasters due to climate change, and Sweden is no exception. In the past 10 years Sweden has endured two large forest fires which devastated both land and property and which had huge financial impacts on society. Learning from such disasters is an important task for the crisis management system since learning is vital to be able to both prevent, prepare for, and manage new disasters. By conducting a qualitative in-depth analysis of the post-crisis learning process after the forest fire in 2014, this study aims to examine how actors learn from disasters as well as provide insight into the post-crisis organisational learning process in general. The actions of the Swedish Government and Parliament is evaluated by linking organisational learning to policy change, in such that for learning in the post-crisis management to have happened, the actor needs to have both identified lessons from the disaster, as well as implemented these into policy. In this study a text analysis is conducted on the two inquiries ordered by the Government after the fire to determine the “lessons identified”, and a plethora of government documents is analysed to ascertain whether the lessons identified have been acted upon and implemented into policy. It was found that the inquiries identified many valuable lessons, and that the authorities in most cases had implemented, or tried to implement, the lessons into policy. However, the protracted process of implementation, which led to some measures not being fully implemented until 2021, allowed new fires to occur before the issues were remedied. It is therefore argued that the efficiency of the Swedish Government’s post-crisis learning process should perhaps be questioned.

The significant rise of both chronic diseases and disasters in the last 20 years and the healthcare outcomes of individuals with chronic diseases during and in the aftermath of disasters have raised concerns among public health practitioners, healthcare providers, the U.S government, and the general public. Researchers have indicated that during disasters, the health outcomes of individuals with chronic diseases are significantly unfavorable compared to the general public. However, there is inadequate information on the management of chronic diseases, quality of care, and resource identification and allocation by disaster responders. This qualitative, grounded theory study, explored how the study participants addressed chronic disease needs during and after disasters. A total of 15 adult disaster relief responders who had been involved in disaster planning, response, or care management of individuals with chronic diseases, were recruited through snowballing, public/bulleting postings, and social media. Using the ecological model of disaster management allowed the identification of individual and societal influences that hinder disaster preparedness and chronic disease management. Data collection consisted of semistructured in-depth open-ended interview questions, allowing participants to share their lived experiences. Data were analyzed through open, axial, and selective coding and managed using the Atlas ti8 software. The findings supported the ecological model of disaster management and strategies such as the use of special needs shelters during impending disasters. Such strategies could enhance disaster preparedness and planning efforts and potentially improve health outcomes during and after disasters.

En pandemisk influensa medför en stor risk för samhället där både sociala och ekonomiska aspekter tar skada. Risker kräver beredskap på såväl internationella som individuella nivåer och kan påverka hur stor konsekvensen av en risk blir. Denna studie syftar till att undersöka den individuella beredskapen kring det nya coronaviruset, covid-19. Med stöd av ramverket Protection Motivation Theory som beskriver människors olika beteenden inför en risk och vad som motiverar individer till att vidta en eller flera skyddande åtgärder. Vilka faktorer som påverkar en individs riskperception och hur detta i sin tur kan påverka den individuella beredskapen undersöks i studien. Även betalningsviljan för ett eventuellt vaccin mot covid-19 undersöks.   Metoden som används för att undersöka individernas riskperception av covid-19 är en kvantitativ enkätundersökning. Enkäten konstruerades till stor del utifrån ramverket och dess faktorer som sägs påverka en individs beteende men också utifrån studiens forskningsfråga och för att uppfylla uppsatsens syfte. Enkäten genomfördes av studenter på tre olika program på Karlstads Universitet.   Studiens resultat visar att Karlstads Universitetsstudenter inte uppfattar smittan eller spridningen av covid-19 som något stort hot vid den tiden då undersökningen genomfördes, mellan 24 februari och 11 mars. Detta har även lett till att skyddande åtgärder inte vidtagits i någon stor omfattning för att stoppa smittan eller spridningen av coronaviruset. De skyddande åtgärderna har inte heller, enligt majoriteten av studenterna, uppfattats som effektiva för att undvika smitta eller spridning av covid-19 trots att de rekommenderats av svenska myndigheter.  Betalningsviljan för vaccinering är enligt denna studie hög i jämförelse med vad tidigare vaccineringar mot pandemisk influensa har kostat trots att viljan för vaccination mot covid-19 endast finns hos hälften av respondenterna.   Slutligen kan det konstateras att riskperceptionen påverkar den individuella beredskapen gentemot en risk och att detta bidrar till vilka åtgärder som vidtas eller inte. Uppfattningen av en risk kan påverka vilken information som tas upp av en individ, vilka åtgärder som vidtas och under en pandemisk influensa kan den individuella beredskapen påverka spridningen av ett virus och därmed ett helt samhälle. / A pandemic flu poses a great risk to society where both social and economic aspects are harmed. Risks require preparedness at both international levels and individual levels and can affect the extent of the risk. This study aims to investigate the individual preparedness of the new coronavirus, covid-19. With support from the framework Protection Motivation Theory which describes people's various behaviors at risk and what motivates individuals to take one or several protective measures. The factors that affect an individual's risk perception and how they in turn influence the individual preparedness are examined in the study. The willingness to pay for a possible covid-19 vaccine is also being investigated.   The method used to investigate individuals' risk perception of covid-19 is a quantitative survey. The questionnaire was constructed mainly on the basis of the framework and its factors that states to have influence on individual behavior. Also, the questionnaire was constructed to answer the study's research question and fulfill the purpose of the essay. The survey was conducted by students in three various programs at Karlstads University.   The study's results show that students at Karlstads University do not perceive the infection or extent of covid-19 as a major threat at the time the survey was conducted. This has shown that protective measures have not been taken to prevent the spread of coronavirus. The protective measures have not been considered effective to avoid the virus or the spread of covid-19 although they have been recommended by Swedish authorities. According to this study, the willingness to pay for vaccination is high in comparison with what previous vaccines against pandemic flu has cost, although the willingness for vaccination against covid-19 is found only in half of the respondents.   Finally, it can be found that risk perception affects individual preparedness in a crisis and that this contributes to what measures are taken. The perception of a risk can affect how information is taken up by an individual, what measures are taken and during a pandemic flu the individual preparedness can affect the extent of a virus spread and by that an entire society.

<div>Real-time social media data can provide useful information on evolving events and situations. In addition, various domain users are increasingly leveraging real-time social media data to gain rapid situational awareness. Informed by discussions with first responders and government officials, we focus on two major barriers limiting the widespread adoption of social media for situational awareness: the lack of geotagged data and the deluge of irrelevant information during events. Geotags are naturally useful, as they indicate the location of origin and provide geographic context. Only a small portion of social media is geotagged, however, limiting its practical use for situational awareness. The deluge of irrelevant data provides equal difficulties, impeding the effective identification of semantically relevant information. Existing methods for short text relevance classification fail to incorporate users' knowledge into the classification process. Therefore, classifiers cannot be interactively retrained for specific events or user-dependent needs in real-time, limiting situational awareness. In this work, we first adapt, improve, and evaluate a state-of-the-art deep learning model for city-level geolocation prediction, and integrate it with a visual analytics system tailored for real-time situational awareness. We then present a novel interactive learning framework in which users rapidly identify relevant data by iteratively correcting the relevance classification of tweets in real-time. We integrate our framework with the extended Social Media Analytics and Reporting Toolkit (SMART) 2.0 system, allowing the use of our interactive learning framework within a visual analytics system adapted for real-time situational awareness.</div>

As a result of the United Nations’ International Decade for Natural Disaster Reduction (1990-2000), and recent high profile disasters, disaster risk reduction has climbed high on the international political agenda. There has been a paradigm shift from reacting to disasters towards preparing for and mitigating effects of disasters. Among the measures that have been highlighted on the disaster risk reduction agenda are early warning systems. In a Swedish context, there are needs for early warnings for various flood risk types. Municipalities carry big responsibilities for managing flood risks, and early warnings have a potential to facilitate decision-making and ultimately reduce flood losses. The aim of this thesis is to describe how a variety of flood warning signals are used in the risk management process of Swedish municipalities, how they can contribute to the flood risk reducing process, and which factors influence the success of this. The thesis is based on two papers. Paper I is based on interviews with three respondents from Swedish municipalities that have invested in and established local early warning systems. The paper shows that the possible effects from a local early warning system are not only reduced flood losses but also potential spinoff, the occurrence of which is dependent on the well-being of the organisation and its risk management processes. Paper II is based on interviews with 23 respondents at 18 Swedish municipalities, who have responsibilities related to flood risk management, and one respondent who works at SMHI with hydrological warning. The paper shows that municipalities can use a variety of complementary flood warning signals to facilitate decision-making for a proactive flood response. This is however not systematically the case, and is dependent on available resources. The theoretical contribution of this thesis is a development of existing conceptual models of early warning systems with respect to risk management and system contexts, and the use of complementary warning signals. / Following the United Nations’ International Decade for Natural Disaster Reduction (1990-2000), and recent high profile disasters, disaster risk reduction has climbed high on the international political agenda. Among the measures that have been highlighted are early warning systems – for Swedish municipalities who are responsible for managing flood risks, early warnings have a potential to facilitate decision-making and ultimately reduce flood losses. This licentiate thesis, based on two articles, aims to describe how a variety of flood warning signals are used in the risk management process of Swedish municipalities, how they can contribute to the flood risk reducing process, and which factors influence the success of this. The articles show that the possible effects from a local early warning system are not only reduced flood losses but also potential spin-off benefits, the occurrence of which is dependent on factors such as organisational culture and the functioning of the wider risk management system, and that municipalities can use a variety of complementary flood warning signals to facilitate decision-making for a proactive flood response which, however, is not systematically the case as benefits are dependent on available resources.