30 years of disaster risk management: a critical review

Abstract

More than three decades of initiatives and unquantifiable resources invested in reducing human and material losses due to disasters have failed to show the least promising results. On the contrary, year after year the impact of these events grows and accumulates in an escalation that cannot be contained. The actions undertaken by national and international bureaucracies have proven to be inefficient in practice, as have the efforts of the academic community and organisations dedicated to the generation and promotion of knowledge, including networks of professionals or non-governmental organisations.Why, in the face of apparent clarity and agreement on the causes of risk and disasters by governments and the international community, has no progress been made in reducing them? Why have risk reduction actions failed to transcend emergency preparedness and response? Why has the knowledge generated so far on the causality of risk not been translated into effective action? What is the role that societies subject to risk conditions or affected by disasters should play in more efficient intervention schemes to reduce risk? These are some of the questions that this paper seeks to answer.