How hazards turn into disasters: Perspectives of emergency responders

This study investigates how disaster and emergency management professionals prioritize the factors that shape disaster risk and resilience across different contexts. Recognizing that natural hazards become disasters when they affect vulnerable communities, the research examines the relative importance of exposure, vulnerability and coping capacity, while exploring how these factors interact to influence disaster outcomes. To address this gap, this article identifies critical exposure, vulnerability, and coping capacity factors, elicits their priority among emergency responders from different contexts, and analyses their perceived interdependences to understand their cascading potentials. 

The results show that the most catastrophic disasters are perceived to be caused by a combination of multiple factors and their interdependences. It was also found that practitioners thought that active civil protection agencies and available disaster risk financing have the greatest potential to prevent disasters.