Citizenry-Based & Development-Oriented Disaster Response Chapter 3 The Hazard, Vulnerability and Capacity Assessment What? Involves a participatory analysis of past patterns of hazards and present threats at the community level (hazard assessment), combined with an understanding of the underlying causes of why hazards become disasters (vulnerability assessment) and of the available resources an affected community uses to cope with the adverse effects (capacity assessment) Origin CDRN developed the HVCA after the1990 Northern Luzon earthquakes and the 1991 Pinatubo eruption, when it realized the importance of enabling communities to undertake disaster preparedness responses. It modified some of the materials CDRC staff obtained from ADPC’s Disaster Management Courses in Bangkok, especially the workshop facilitated by Mary Anderson and Peter Woodrow1 . Purpose z
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to identify the elements at risk in the community and to prioritize those elements that need to be protected to identify appropriate disaster preparedness and mitigation responses which the community will include in their counter disaster plan to raise the community’s awareness about potential disaster risk and what they can do about it (This is a first step towards organizing the community into a grassroots disaster response organization.) to provide disaster specific information, which can be integrated in baseline studies for disaster mitigation and development programs results can be used during emergency periods to identify emergency relief needs and to draft appeals (particularly if community has become inaccessible) repeating the HVCA after some time provides indicators to measure changes in people’s vulnerability
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