Natural disaster policy

Document Type:Essay

Subject Area:English

Document 1

The natural disaster policies usually focus on the reduction of damages caused by the natural calamities. These policies are based on a conception that disasters always follow natural hazards. Various conferences have been held to provide opportunities for the promotion of strategic and systematic approaches to reducing risks and vulnerabilities to natural hazards. One of such conferences is the World Conference on Disaster Reduction, which was held in 2005 in Japan. Natural disasters have had major effects in history, which shows the need to come up with effective natural disaster policies. In this stage, disaster management was based on the premise that local governments had a key role to play in mitigation and relief. Notable policies in this stage included the Flood Control Acts, Disaster Relief Act, and the Civil Defense Act (Rivera and Miller 7-8).

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In stage three, public policy became focused on mitigation and military preparedness. This is evidenced by attention being given to policies that are oriented to the destruction and reconstruction of property, and the creation of a federal response procedure based on disaster relief. In addition, there is high emphasis on scientific preparedness, and mitigation policies following risk assessment models. The low income earners are the ones who are affected the most by these disasters especially when tax revenues are channeled to disaster response, which makes social services to lack funding (UNISDR 1). The studies on disaster management have revealed that donors and governments usually reallocate resources from key development programs in efforts to fund disaster relief. Even though it is difficult to measure the impact of these resource reallocations, it is expected that the poor are the ones who receive disproportionate effects by affecting the efforts to reduce poverty.

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Disasters stretch copping stogies to a point where they break. As such, they have long term effects. The key dilemma faced by governments is insufficient funds when disasters strike. As such, they usually find themselves unable to recover from disastrous events due to the resources diverted to solve the problem at hand. One global agreement is that disaster response programs are costly to both government and other disaster response non-governmental organizations. With insurance, the risk of dealing with response challenges is transferred to insurance companies. As such, the government only comes in by financing minor activities. Secondly, it has enabled the countries to maintain stability and continue meeting their financial obligations. This results in reconstruction efforts being put in place within a short time (Zissener 1).

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However, for the insurance to work, several conditions must be put into consideration by the international communities. First, the idea has to be accepted by the respective governments and there must be a political will. Secondly, donors must concentrate their support to help this approach get to scale. It also guarantees expedited payment because the investors are only allowed to invest the premium issued to them in risk-free assets. Furthermore, the bond is easy to manage compared with the funding approaches currently used by governments in times of disasters (Kunreuther and Erwann 44). From an expert perspective, this policy is effective because it involves collaboration between governments and investors in which the governments become a source of personnel and investors provide response funds during disasters.

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