News in Japan - October

GEJET:
Evacuation advisory lifted for part of town near Fukushima nuclear plant
Public (14/10/20) the video from the sea area of ​​8 Google, the Sanriku coast

Japan:

Recovery of bodies suspended at volcano due to toxic gases and ash

4 deaths confirmed; 27 other climbers feared dead on erupting volcano

Sudden eruption of volcano very rare

JMA website for volcanic warnings: http://www.jma.go.jp/en/volcano/

Japan's volcanoes: Could Fuji be next? According to a government study published in June, 80% of inhabited areas threatened by the effects of a potential nearby volcanic eruption have no evacuation plan.

4,000 take part in Mt Fuji eruption drill Nearly 4,000 residents in 26 cities, towns and villages in Shizuoka, Yamanashi and Kanagawa prefectures around the mountain took part in the first-ever such drill, said a disaster management official for the Shizuoka prefectural government. On Sept 27, Mt Ontake, some 120 kilometers Mt Fuji, erupted without warning—killing 56 people and leaving at least seven others missing in Japan’s deadliest eruption for almost 90 years. Mochizuki said the Mt Fuji exercise had been planned for three years. “But because of the (Ontake) eruption, we are conducting the drill in a serious atmosphere.”

Storm heads off northeast coast; 2 dead, 1 missing, 96 injured

Typhoon Vongfong leaves 2 dead, nearly 100 injured in Japan

Netherlands:
High water due to autumn storm (Dutch)

USA:
Designing rivers: Environmental flows for ecosystem services in rivers natural and novel

Other:
Stunning HD footage of Super Typhoon Vongfong from the International Space Station
Cyclone kills 24 in east India, sparks fears of floods
Can the world produce enough food for 2 bln more people?
Desert streams: Deceptively simple
Glacier song: Studying how water moves through glaciers
New methods to calculate risk of floods
DRR Mission Report NL team to Philippines

100 million people affected by disasters in 2013 (Dutch) The amount of disasters (529) as well as the amount of affected people has not been this low in the past 10 years (World Disaster Report IFRC). 87% of the affected lives in Asia.

Vulnerable people:

Older people hit hardest by disasters - report Older people suffer disproportionately from floods, cyclones, typhoons, heatwaves and other disasters, yet are often excluded from disaster management planning, according to a report released on Monday.The report by the United Nations Office for Disaster Risk Reduction (UNISDR) and HelpAge International comes at a time when life expectancy continues to rise and the ageing population continues to grow.

You're never too old to be disaster-resilient
Female civil servant sues over 'institutional sexism' in her ministry

Delta plan Netherlands

Last month the Dutch newspaper Trouw (19th September) reported on the new Dutch Deltaplan, made to counter the current water challenges. The Netherlands is facing increased river discharge, increased precipitation, and a sea level rise of about 35-85 cm, in combination with land subsidence. 

After the 1953 flood disaster safety levels of levees were calculated and levees were prepared accordingly. What was lacking consisted of maintenance (one third of the levees did not fulfill the original safety designs), and the norms were never recalculated to account for any changes, including climate change. The norms also didn't account for levee failures by droughts or by piping, where water seeps through underneath the levee. 

The new norms work differently. Rather than calculating the chance of floods, the chance of levee failure is used. Another change is to use the chance of dying from a flood rather than a flood occurrence. The new norm of acceptable safety is having a chance of 1 in 100,000 to die as a consequence of floods. The standard safety norms for other disasters such as dangerous compounds is 1 in 1,000,000. The reason floods have a higher chance is mainly that it is impossible to arrange physical infrastructure to reach the 1,000,000 safety norm. Furthermore, it is assumed that 1% of all people will drown once a polder is flooded. If the current status of the levee indicates that more people might drown, this levee is up for revision. The new Delta program calculated that over 200 levee areas will have stricter norms.

Other issues still remain, such as the traditional issue of flooding abroad. If the rivers flood in Germany, the water will enter the Netherlands not through the improved rivers, but over land unprotected by levees.

Dissertation published online

GRIPS has published my dissertation titled "Vulnerable People and Flood Risk Management Policies". You can find it here.

Keywords: Disaster Risk Management, disaster law, vulnerable people, social vulnerability, flood, evacuation

Abstract:
The main goal of this study is to evaluate the measures for vulnerable people in Disaster Risk Management (DRM) policies focusing on floods. There are many groups of potentially vulnerable people (e.g., older adults, people with disabilities, people living in poverty) whose characteristics are not accounted for in emergency plans; vulnerable people require more attention if they are to experience an equal disaster risk level.
The original contributions of this study are as follows: a proposal of definitions for vulnerable people and groups of potentially vulnerable people; a theoretical framework with indicators focusing on six groups of vulnerable people; an overview of the potentially vulnerable people for flood hazards in the Netherlands, Japan, and the United States; and a metric designed to evaluate DRM policies, from national to subnational and regional levels.
The results reveal that the top 10 indicators account for 80% of all (gross sum of) potentially vulnerable people, 7 of which are identical. These top 10 indicators can serve as a starting point in order to increase the resilience of the vulnerable population. These 3 countries can learn from each other’s measures regarding the 7 identical indicators, and possibly apply them in their own area. The metric shows that DRM laws rarely anticipate a future increase in the number of potentially vulnerable people, and none of the laws were created by involvement of potentially vulnerable people. We count on our governments to make equitable policies, but this has clearly not yet been established in these developed, democratic countries.

Published paper

The Journal of Disaster Research has published my article titled "A Quantitative Estimate of Vulnerable People and Evaluation of Flood Evacuation Policy", which contains the main research results of my doctoral dissertation. This is an open access journal, you can become a member by registering for free and access all articles published.

Abstract
Disaster Risk Management (DRM) laws and policies ideally contain measures to reduce disaster risk to all exposed people equally, even the most vulnerable people. To investigate this, we estimate the number of potentially vulnerable people in areas exposed to flood hazard, and evaluate the laws and policies which aim to reduce vulnerability. We proposed a theoretical framework based on four recognized characteristics of vulnerability (less physically or mentally capable; fewer material and/or financial resources; less access to information, and restricted by commitments) and created indicators for six groups of potentially vulnerable people: children, older adults, minorities, people with disabilities, people living in poverty, and women. We applied the framework to the populations of Japan, the Netherlands, and the United States, and proposed a new DRM policy evaluation method; and found that measures in DRM laws and policies are not in proportion to the number of potentially vulnerable people. The most numerous indicators included children aged 0-14, women with no car, and people with pets. The top ten indicators account for 80% of all potentially vulnerable people. When addressing the needs of vulnerable people from a policy perspective, these top ten indicators may serve as a starting point in order to increase the resilience of the vulnerable population. Seven of these ten are identical across the three case study countries, meaning the countries can learn from each other’s measures and possibly apply them in their own area. Policy evaluation showed that while many laws and policies do recognize various groups of potentially vulnerable people, they lack detailed support measures. Much remains to be amended in policies on all scale levels if the policies are to realize an equal disaster risk for all exposed people.

Journal ref: Journal of Disaster Research, Vol.9, No.5 pp. 887-900, 2014
Received: June 17, 2014
Accepted: August 7, 2014
Published online: 02 Oct 2014
DOI: 10.20965/jdr.2014.p0887
Indexed in Scopus, Compendex (Ei)