The extraordinary conditions of a major disaster require mobilization of all available resources. This necessity, together with the stretch in the response budget in the public sector and the difficulty of raising funds in the private sector, draws various humanitarian actors with widely diverse capabilities into the affected area. This phenomenon is called the proliferation of actors, or the partner proliferation problem. This problem can have serious counterproductive effects on disaster operations, such as unmanaged independent efforts that lead to a duplication and confusion of effort. The disaster response phase generally lacks the contributions of a long-term outlook and pre-planning, which are adopted in existing long-term structures such as supply chains. The aim of this paper is to provide a structured review of the partner proliferation problem in the response phase and to suggest alternative courses of action for restructuring the disaster response network. Drawing on the concept of Virtual Organizations, the paper concludes that short-term collaboration is a suitable structure for the response phase. Short-term collaboration in the response phase is complementary to long-term collaborations such as supply chains in the recovery, mitigation, and preparedness phases of the disaster cycle. To that end, a conceptual framework is provided for re-structuring the disaster response network to align with the other phases of disaster management. Finally, further research is suggested to develop a decision making tool for partner configuration to meet the specific requirements of a disaster response network.
After a disaster strikes, the disaster severity needs to be estimated in order to provide an adequate humanitarian response. The decision makers need to decide quickly about the requisite supplies and bespoke teams based on the scale and nature of the disruption. The failure of the severity assessment may impose risk to the success of the response operations, leading to the loss of lives at worst. The existing severity assessment tools employ various criteria such as intensity, frequency, vulnerability and capability. However a framework which differentiates between the impact of disasters on communities with different coping capabilities, is missing. For example, an equally intense earthquake affects Japan differently from Haiti, due to the difference in the coping capabilities of the two nations. To that end this paper investigates the records of previous disasters to provide a holistic Disaster Severity Assessment (DSA) tool. This decision support tool accommodates physical and socio-economic impacts of the disaster on the affected population. The assessment is based on six criteria including impact time, fatality, casualty, relative financial damage, Human Development Index (HDI) and Disaster Risk Index (DRI). The resulting decision support tool may be used to diagnose the severity of the disaster immediately after it strikes. It also is capable of accommodating the imprecise data by the means of a fuzzy classification system. This characteristic allows the decision maker to draw a realistic picture of the disaster response required based on the affected population capabilities and reduce the risk of failure in disaster response operations.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.
hi@scite.ai
10624 S. Eastern Ave., Ste. A-614
Henderson, NV 89052, USA
Copyright © 2024 scite LLC. All rights reserved.
Made with 💙 for researchers
Part of the Research Solutions Family.