1. INTRODUCTION
We live in a concept-mediated and concept-loaded world. We cannot escape concepts. Indeed, mixed into our physical Earth and its airy atmosphere is another sphere -- a component of a much larger sphere that I have elsewhere called the memetic sphere. Things of planet Earth, and of the universe at large, are of course out there in the material sphere (and ipso facto outside of the mind), but don't mean a thing to us until we process them in the mind and give them a name of sorts -- that is, until we thus attach to them a set or sets of concepts (that is, memes), which is the only viable path to actualizing our sense impressions. READ MORE
The purpose of this list is fairly straightforward. It is to zero in on concepts that are, thanks to informed conversations in a wide range of texts and media, key to pushing the agenda of disaster management in its widest sense. That is, to list the key concepts in alphabetical order, define them, and interrogate their potential for application in the rough-and-tumble of real emergency and disasters situations. As we go along, additional concepts will be added to those which initially in this Part 1 of a two-part series (which covers letters A to M of the alphabet), and which will soon follow in Part 2 (covering N to Z).
2. THE CONCEPTS
A to M:
Appraisal, Basic Needs, Chaos, Climate Change, Community, Conflict, Contamination, Contingency, Deforestation, Deployment, Desertification, Disaster, Early Warning, Emergency, Emergency Response Team (ERT), Entitlement, Expert/Abstract Systems, Famine, Global Warming, Government Service Packages (GSPs), Hazard, Hunger, Incident Command System (ICS), Indicator, Intelligence, Just-in-Time (JIT), Logistics, Management, Mitigation.
3. THE DEFINITIONS AND ELABORATIONS
Appraisal: This refers to the pre-implementation activity undertaken ahead of, and intended to inform, possible action in connection with a 'project', or a concerning situation. Such activity helps to generate the baseline information, or 'preliminary' data-set, essential to getting started with an actionable level of confidence. In emergency management, such a 'project' will address a natural or human-caused incident or contingency. This may be the onset of an epidemic or a livelihood-threatening weather condition.
Basic Needs: Abraham Maslow's motivation theory, inextricably linked to his notion of 'hierarchy of needs', is an illuminating and still enticing approach to conversations about basic needs. Indeed, the 'twinning' of motivation and needs is practically unavoidable, regardless of the faults that one may find with either the theory or the hierarchy. At the bottom of his five-layer hierarchy are "physiological needs". Just above them are "safety needs". In this scheme of things, the most basic of all needs -- and READ MORE
Chaos: George Santayana is reported to have characterized chaos as "a name for any order that produces confusion in our minds". That is, the order or complexity that characterizes a phenomenon or process "out there" in the natural and social world may instead appear chaotic to the observer who does not have the wherewithal (tools, time, training, frame-of-mind or the like) to grasp its essential or 'below-the-surface' nature. READ MORE
Climate Change: The concepts of climate change and global warming are, though distinct, frequently used interchangeably -- and perhaps too frequently. In reality, global warming precedes climate change, which is its logical and worrisome consequence. First the world's average temperature(s) begin to rise and gradually keep on rising, and then local and regional climate systems begin to change in manifest and quantifiable ways READ MORE
Community: In sociology, a community is typically a face-to-face group or 'aggregation' of families and individuals living in relatively close proximity with each other and bound together by certain genealogical and/or 'social ties' as well as ecological/ geographical factors, or givens, to which their livelihoods are more or less physically tied. All of this generates reasons and opportunities for joint action at the local level, and READ MORE
Conflict: Ancient Chinese philosophers saw conflict as the ever-recurring dialectical cycle of Night and Day -- that is, of Yin and Yang. It was a 'fatal embrace' of sorts destined to always produce Tomorrow, and never yesterday. Plato, the Greek philosopher, likewise saw conflict as a dialectical engagement. In his case, it was a clash between good and evil; and, indeed, he held that "each thing has its evil and good". This dichotomy between 'good' and 'evil' or Self and Other READ MORE
Contamination: It is fairly common knowledge in science that this concept originated from the Latin word contaminat, which means "made impure" -- or "tainted with impurity". Of several definitions given in one English dictionary (The Free Dictionary), the most broadly-conceived gives us the idea of contamination as "The presence of foreign material that adulterates or renders impure a material the composition of which is thereby ..." READ MORE
Contingency: Generically, the term contingency refers to an event (or events) or variables or parameters likely in the 'foreseeable future' to impact upon, shape or influence, interfere with, or intervene in (a) an identified process, or (b) the operations of an open system. Contingencies are the ‘environmental’ factors capable of affecting the processes internal to an open system. Mapping contingency scenarios -- in terms of the most likely turn(s) of events -- is an invaluable exercise, and a READ MORE
Deforestation: This refers to the widespread and long-term loss of tree-cover generally and mapped forest-zones in particular. Deforestation is accelerating in many places around the world, largely to growing human populations and the unrestrained use, and even plunder, of forest resources for household use and commercial purposes. Among these uses and purposes, as Sheila Reed (1992: 102-115) has pointed out, are: farming, livestock grazing, firewood collection and logging READ MORE
Deployment: Deployment is management action which involves sending (dispatching) an individual or team – that is, a contingency (or expeditionary) team or force – with certain 'self-contained' capabilities required to deal effectively with a specific ‘emergent’ problem; that is, an emergency.
Desertification: This is a long-term process brought about and sustained primarily by climate change. It occurs gradually in the form of a retreat of forest cover and grasslands in the wake of significantly diminished rains as well as the depletion of ground water. The causal factors in desertification are widely documented in scientific research. One thing is certain, however: the great deserts of the world -- such as the Sahara, the Gobi and the Middle East deserts -- are not the products of "the human READ MORE
Disaster: A disaster is a catastrophic/traumatic, critical and consequential result of an extreme form of emergency which we didn't do anything about (to prevent or mitigate), or couldn't. The terms emergency and disaster are often used interchangeably, and confusingly, in "disaster management" conversations. An emergency is, in fact, solely the event in any distinction between an emergency and a disaster. An emergency is an emergent event, for sure, and by the same token READ MORE
Early Warning: All early warning actions or instances involve, in the first place, the identification by certified or acknowledged experts (or expert systems) -- or organizations -- of a likely or impending emergency or disaster event. Such identification increasingly involves a considerable amount of predictive analytics, though some warnings must be given on very short notice -- of a few days and sometimes even hours. Identification is of necessity followed by a notification , or the "sounding" of an READ MORE
Emergency: In addition to the conceptualization of an emergency, under the concept of Disaster, we can say that an emergency refers to any out of the ordinary event which threatens to do harm or actually does harm to human well-being, life and property; or to the natural environment. All disasters are emergencies, but not all emergencies are disasters. One definition, once offered by FEMA to a business gathering, is that an emergency is: "any unplanned [we may add, or planned] event that can cause READ MORE
Emergency Response Team (ERT): This is a small group of well-equipped individuals trained for rapid response (or deployment) to any one of a set of emergency hot-spots, or to a specific incidence or occurrence of an emergency situation (see, also, Incident Command System further down this page).
Entitlement: Amartya Sen introduced the concept of entitlement into conversations about food scarcity and famine. He pointed out that people suffer starvation not because of an absolute scarcity of food, but because of their lack of entitlement to it. In essence, vulnerability to famine is crucially a function of one's relative entitlement to food. In his book titled Poverty and Famines, he suggested four (clearly unequal) options for gaining access to food: (a) direct production, (b) food procurement READ MORE
Expert/Abstract Systems: These are systems (which increasingly subsume the notion of Artificial Intelligence, or AI) designed and built by technical or professional experts to (a) mimic and 'internalize' the expertise of experts and related rules of human reasoning, and (b) actualize semantic nets for classifying and organizing knowledge generated through such 'artificial' reasoning into 'actionable' forms and formats. All of this is intended to make key structures, processes and functions more READ MORE
Famine: This refers to widespread and systemic hunger, or more particularly starvation, that arises from acute and persisting food shortages in an area or a population. It is "the most severe and visible form of hunger" (Barbour and Dudley, 1995: 12). The main causes of famine have historically been such natural factors as drought, floods and related crop failures. However, as the two authors and others have argued, famine, wherever it occurs, has more recently become, primarily, a human-caused READ MORE
Global Warming: As already pointed out under Climate Change, global warming precedes climate change, which is thus its logical and worrisome consequence. First the world's average temperature(s) begin to rise and keep on rising, and then local and regional climate systems begin to change in manifest and quantifiable ways. Global warming is itself the direct effect of greenhouse gas emissions -- particularly the emission of carbon dioxide, methane and nitrous oxide. These READ MORE
Government Service Packages (GSPs): The idea of GSP, which had been tried before in Sarajevo and elsewhere, really took off during the Rwanda genocide of 1994. As their name suggests, GSPs (sometimes called simply "Service Packages") were conceived of as "a last resort in exceptionally large emergencies" justifying the use of "military and civil defence assets" (UNHCR, 2000: 359). It was argued that the scale of GSP READ MORE
Hazard: A hazard is a potential source of harm to individuals, groups or a wide array of processes, systems or ‘things’ of crucial value to us as individuals, groups, communities, organizations, institutions or society. A hazard is a ‘benign’ threat ready to ‘happen’ at any 'opportune' time. As Kasperson and Pijawka (1985: 8) see it, “Hazards may be broadly defined as threats to humans and what they value – life, well-being, material goods, and environment”. In a way, a hazard exists "out there" READ MORE
Hunger: It is the rarest of individuals who have never felt hungry at some point, between 'breakfast' and supper (or supper and 'breakfast'), during the recurrent 24-hour cycles of Earth Day. Feeling hungry, like feeling thirsty, is part of the human condition. It is the reason we routinely eat, or drink water. But the hunger that draws public attention is a significant threshold beyond that cycle; even though, unlike famine, it is generally individual-specific or household-specific, and more localized READ MORE
Incident Command System (ICS): All forms of ICS, as well as ERT (mentined earlier), are by definition the results, implicit or explicit, of contingency planning and, even more importantly, accumulated experience in the "field". As pointed out in an earlier post on ICS:
ICS is obviously a much-touted integrated solution, but a solution for what? ICS was never intended to prevent or reduce the occurrence of incidents -- emergencies or disasters of various kinds -- but to respond optimally to them after they READ MORE
Indicators: These are any measures, yardsticks, benchmarks, milestones or ‘proxies’ (quantitative and/or qualitative) used to document or represent (to stand for) or measure/'signal' the magnitude or attainment/achievement of an otherwise elusive target (or goal), event, phenomenon, problem or process. An indicator is a sign/signal or specification of status along a range of possible status-points -- which are in turn encapsulated in a specific standard or 'basket' of standards READ MORE
Intelligence: In "security" or safety terms, as broadly conceived -- and, by extension, outside of the field of psychology -- intelligence generally refers to any kind of information or set of data considered crucial to maintaining the status quo (and related advantages), overcoming threats to it, and/or gaining actionable advantage over identified barriers to desired goals. In a much-quoted passage, Stephen Hawking, leaning toward the psychological view and away from the "security" perspective, sees intelligence READ MORE
Just-in-Time (JIT): Almost inextricably associated with Japanese manufacturing and transportation industries, the JIT principle is a crucially important component of savvy logistics management in war and peace -- and during all sorts of emergencies and disasters. The underlying idea is to reduce the temporal and financial costs of warehousing or storing of supplies, components or finished goods prior to intended use to near zero. JIT relies massively on the soundness of established transportation routes and READ MORE
Logistics: This is the art and science of moving, transporting and/or delivering things (material, hardware, equipment or supplies), services or even people across geographical space. Crucial considerations here include: efficiency, coordination, timeliness, security and cost; or, in general, the appropriateness of the means in relation to the mission. Vehicular breakdown and safety of passage are, likewise, always a twin-concern requiring management's 'unblinking' attention and capacity READ MORE
Management: According to Harry (2001: 16), management is a "description of what people who do the managing do". He closes the management loop by adding that, in general, the terms management and managers refer to "the people who do the managing." It follows that, in the context of disasters and emergencies, (disaster) management is a description of both what the people who manage them do, and of what kinds of people they are (in terms of skill-sets and broad social READ MORE
Mitigation: Mitigation alludes to proactive or preemptive measures or steps taken to minimize or reduce the impacts of specific incidents, emergencies or disasters before they actually occur, even when their occurrence is much anticipated -- that is, "around the corner". However, mitigation may also entail 'remedial' activities concurrent with the 'unfolding' event or situation against which they are directed.
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