While social vulnerability in the face of disasters has received increasing academic attention, relatively little is known about the extent to which that knowledge is reflected in practice by institutions involved in disaster management. This study charts the practitioners' approaches to disaster vulnerability in eight European countries: Belgium; Estonia; Finland; Germany; Hungary; Italy; Norway; and Sweden. It draws on a comparative document analysis and 95 interviews with disaster managers and reveals significant differences across countries in terms of the ontology of vulnerability, its sources, reduction strategies, and the allocation of related duties. To advance the debate and provide conceptual clarity, we put forward a heuristic model to facilitate different understandings of vulnerability along the dimensions of human agency and technological structures as well as social support through private relations and state actors. This could guide risk analysis of and planning for major hazards and could be adapted further to particular types of disasters.
While social vulnerability assessments should play a crucial part in disaster management, there is a lack of assessment tools that retain sensitivity to the situation‐specific dynamics of vulnerabilities emerging in particular hazard scenarios. We developed a novel scenario‐based vulnerability assessment framework together with practitioners in crisis management and assessed the suitability of its components in three past crises and their scenario‐based derivations: a large‐scale power outage, the COVID‐19 pandemic, and a cyber‐attack. Rather than deterministically concluding about vulnerability based on prefixed factors, the framework guides relevant stakeholders to systematically think through categories of vulnerability pertinent to a scenario. We used a table‐top exercise, interviews, and focus groups to demonstrate how the framework broadens the crisis managers’ understanding of the scope of factors that may cause vulnerability, the related sources of information and enables to identify individuals burdened by certain vulnerability mixes. The new framework could be applied to different types of crises to enhance preparedness, demand‐driven relief and rescue during critical events.
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