Spatiotemporal analysis of the interaction of decentralization, development and disaster cascades in Mindanao, Philippines.

• Main Author: Minimo, Likha Goce
• Format: Other/Unknown Material
• Language: English
• Published: University of Canterbury 2021
• Subjects: Pacific; First Nations
• Online Access: https://hdl.handle.net/10092/102904; https://doi.org/10.26021/12038

As global disaster losses keep rising in the early 21st century, global disaster risk management continue to move away from top-down emergency response approaches, towards the transfer of responsibilities, powers, and resources to regional and local levels, in efforts to decentralise disaster risk management. Over the same period, researchers began to question the idea of disaster as a linear ‘cause-and-effect’ process, instead proposing that disasters are better understood as the cascading effects of non-linear interactions between environmental triggers and social-technical vulnerabilities. Theories of these interactions as ‘disaster cascades’ focused on interdependent environmental and critical infrastructure systems, which include disaster risk management teams and facilities as critical nodes within those systems. Attempting to account for the complex mix of contributing factors and feedback loops involved as disasters unfold, the concept of ‘disaster cascades’ provides the opportunity for more holistic, interdisciplinary and nuanced approaches to disaster risk assessment and management. This interdisciplinary doctoral project uses scenarios to apply the concept of ‘disaster cascades’ in a spatiotemporal assessment of interacting environmental triggers and points of vulnerability in critical disaster risk management and development systems, using Mindanao, in the Philippines, as a case study. The Philippines is exposed to a range of geological and meteorological hazard cascades due to its position on the Pacific Ring of Fire, on an active tectonic plate boundary, in the Typhoon Belt. It was also one of the first nations to adopt the decentralised disaster risk management system recommended in the Hyogo Framework for Action (HFA) 2005- 2015. The Republic Act 10121 (RA 10121; Philippine Disaster Risk Reduction and Management Act of 2010) aimed to increase national disaster risk management capacity by decentralizing powers, responsibilities, and resources to regional and local levels. The Mindanao Island group ...