Disaster
This is an accepted version of this page A disaster is an event that causes serious harm to people, buildings, economies, or the environment, and the affected community cannot handle it alone.
[3] Human-made disasters like oil spills, terrorist attacks and power outages are caused by people.
[4][5][6] Climate change also affects how often disasters due to extreme weather hazards happen.
It focuses on actions to reduce risk before a disaster occurs, rather than on response and recovery after the event.
DRR and climate change adaptation measures are similar in that they aim to reduce vulnerability of people and places to natural hazards.
When a disaster happens, the response includes actions like warning and evacuating people, rescuing those in danger, and quickly providing food, shelter, and medical care.
[9]: 13 UNDRO (1984) defined a disaster in a more qualitative fashion as:[13] "an event, concentrated in time and space, in which a community undergoes severe danger and incurs such losses to its members and physical appurtenances that the social structure is disrupted and the fulfilment of all or some of the essential functions of the society is prevented."
This definition includes indirect losses of life caused after the initial onset of the disaster.
Large-scale disasters affect wider society and need national or international help.
How bad the damage is depends on how well people are prepared for disasters and how strong the buildings, roads, and other structures are.
[24] Human choices in architecture,[27] fire risk,[28][29] and resource management[30] can cause or worsen natural disasters.
Climate change also affects how often disasters due to extreme weather hazards happen.
[31] Human-made disasters are serious harmful events caused by human actions and social processes.
Long-lasting local shortages are generally due to government mismanagement, violent conflict, or an economic system that does not distribute food where needed.
The effects of a disaster include all human, material, economic and environmental losses and impacts.
[9]: 13 The Emergency Events Database (EM-DAT) records statistics about disasters related to natural hazards.
It is very challenging to measure the costs of disasters accurately, and many countries lack the resources and technical capacity to do so.
[41] These countries already have higher vulnerability and lower resilience to these events, which exacerbates the effects of the hazards.
The objective is to save lives, ensure health and safety, and meet the subsistence needs of the people affected.
Emergency response aims to provide immediate help to keep people alive, improve their health and support their morale.
It can involve specific but limited aid, such as helping refugees with transport, temporary shelter, and food.
This in turn comes from the Ancient Greek pejorative prefix δυσ- (dus-) "bad"[48] and ἀστήρ (aster), "star".
[49] So the word disaster ("bad star" in Greek) comes from an astrological sense of a calamity blamed on the position of planets.
