Integrated participatory rural vulnerability reduction in hazard-prone communities : disaster and climate change risk identification, analysis, and assessment methodologies

Ph.D. University of Hawaii at Manoa 2012.Includes bibliographical references.Community-based decision-making for development requires an integrated understanding and prioritizing of the risks that different groups in affected communities face.Optimizing this risk reduction requires methodologies for vulnerability identification, analysis, and assessment that first determine the underlying criteria upon which to evaluate alternatives for prevention, mitigation, and adaptation of future risks. Integration issues cut across disciplines and fields in risk identification, analysis, and assessment for sustainable development, disaster risk reduction, and climate change adaptation. These integration issues include needing to bridge natural science and social science approaches; quantitative and qualitative approaches; all sectors that provide functional goods and services to a community; externally-driven product-focused approaches with internally-driven community-based participatory process-focused approaches; risks and risk reduction impacts in a community with those of other communities vertically and horizontally; risks from all stresses and shocks; past and present risks with those from trends and expectations of future changes; and these risks into a mainstreamed riskinformed development decision-making process. Three papers methodologically utilize approaches related to sustainable livelihoods, food and livelihood security, disaster recovery, climate change, and population transmigration. Examples from original research in Indonesia, the Maldives, and Timor Leste are used to discuss and recommend improvements in integrated community-based disaster, climate, and related risk identification, analysis, and assessment methodology frameworks based on these eight components of integration. The common thread among them is their consideration of which types of integration are being addressed and which of the unaddressed types should be addressed in such studies. Although each study has its own methodologies, results, analysis, and conclusions, they are synthesized in the dissertation with an integration evaluation framework and concluding discussion and recommendations. Research, government, and non-government personnel interested in integrated approaches to risk reduction and development decision-making will find it useful