Risk at the Margins (RAM): a blueprint for defragmenting disaster risk reduction with populations at risk

The burden of disasters remains grossly unequal: they disproportionately and repeatedly impact the most vulnerable populations in low- and middle- income countries. Thus, we wish to find a way to improve how we address community disaster risk in those contexts. Poor progress in reducing the impacts on lives, livelihoods and sustainable development that natural hazards have on populations in developing countries has been attributed to a weak focus on 'prospective practice' in addressing resilience to multiple hazards. In other words a lack of methods and strategies that allow people to adapt to, cope with or avoid the accumulation of future risk while undergoing sustainable development.

Current academic and development practices are largely siloed, which means they focus on individual hazards, or approaches that are either focussed on understanding and warning people about the hazards, or on understanding how communities can be vulnerable and acting to change that. For example, hazard specialists often frame their analysis of risks 'upstream' on the basis of physical drivers rather than 'downstream' on social and environmental impacts. Those whose analysis focuses on vulnerability outcomes can overlook the way that hazards can change and radically reshape the nature of exposure. This fragmentation creates situations where problems and solutions commonly are not effectively aligned, and it becomes much harder for populations at risk to implement strategies that adapt, cope with or avoid future risk (prospective practice). This problem remains despite a growing recognition of the value that interdisciplinary engagement would bring in solving this.

We aim to address this by bringing together a wide grouping of GCRF and other related projects to drop the disconnect between scientific-technical solutions to disaster risk and projects that address the fundamental social vulnerabilities (the first stage). We will use this in order to develop methods and strategies that encourage prospective practice (to develop in the second stage). We will use the lens of extensive hazards to address this challenge during the first stage. Extensive hazards (those experienced for long periods or more intensely in smaller geographic areas - e.g. drought, ashfall, landsliding, pollution) can generate negative outcomes that are more damaging to sustainable development than infrequent high cost events, particularly for populations with other vulnerabilities. We think that extensive hazards need a multi-hazard approach to their characterisation and monitoring, and that their mitigation could be considered from the point of view of their impacts on the local populations: they need a joined up approach. We will begin by focussing on three 'design challenges' in places where we understand the social, political and cultural context and have identified projects that could benefit from this joined-up approach. These are in Nepal, St Vincent and Ecuador and, importantly, will be grounded by community groupings in situ. We will evaluate how we answer that and wrap around a broader review of the integration gap and how, why and when it is important to overcome. These processes will create 'a safe space' where we can discuss failures as well as successes and air suspicions arising from different ways of working, experiences or perspectives. We will create new solutions in our focus areas, and synthesise the findings across the project (by working together and the consultation represented in the review). This develops a blueprint for prospective practice that will understand how to: (1) monitor, characterise and mitigate extensive hazard from the perspective of those who experience them; (2) how to situate extensive hazards in the context of everyday risk challenges and policies for sustainable development. We will use this in the second stage project and to inform two new projects that begin during our first stage.

Who might benefit from this research?
1. Communities and individuals experiencing high potential risk to life, health and livelihoods as a result of exposure to multiple environmental hazards. Meaningful reduction of risk for such populations requires not just a focus on preparing for extreme events, such as hurricanes or earthquakes, but an integrated analysis of how different forms and magnitudes of hazard interact and superimpose on one another (including smaller-scale events such as landslides and everyday environmental threats such as pollution and land degradation).

2. Government institutions and civil society organisations that work on different forms of environmental risk management. Many such organisations already recognise both the failings of single-hazard approaches to risk management and the difficulties of achieving change purely through top-down, technical-managerial approaches to risk governance. However, institutionally they are often locked into narrowly-conceived policies and practices that are difficult to shift without clear demonstration of the practical value of alternative, more flexible but inherently more holistic responses to risk.

How might they benefit from this research?

1. People at risk from multiple, intersecting hazards will benefit from the proposed projects through both the prospect of achieving enhanced resilience to the threats they face, and the opportunity for active engagement in tackling those risks. In the three case study settings we will work closely with communities to define and respond to the problems raised by previous technological interventions. We will also give people the opportunity to participate actively in citizen science initiatives, strengthening their capacities to identify and analyse problems, but also strengthening their voice in negotiating their needs for support from governmental authorities and other agencies.

2. A range of governmental and non-governmental stakeholders from the local to the international scale will be engaged in discussion of design challenges for intervention and analysis of ways forward for an integrative approach to reducing risk. We will work with such agencies in each of the case study settings, but also host a series of international discussion workshops with researchers and practitioners (including two side-events at existing major forums on disaster risk), centring on the idea of creating a safe space for critical reflection on what works and what does not. Through this process we aim to strengthen institutional capacities to plan and manage more integrated approaches to risk management.

As the project proceeds to the Second Stage, we will expand and deepen this impact work alongside the scaled up research work, widening the scope of interaction with stakeholders and strengthening the power of demonstration through initiatives designed from the start with community members. Through this we hope to build capacities within and across communities and institutions to work collaboratively toward a sustainable risk reduction.