Suchergebnisse

Abstract
Indigenous environmental disaster management systems are maintained in remotely located communities through intergenerational transmission. This fieldwork illuminates a wealth of unprecedented survival techniques, strategies and skills for offsetting the worst effects of a natural disaster in earthquake-prone areas of north-west Tanzania. Normally, responses from the government and its foreign development partners are hamstrung by bureaucratic red tape, taking too long in reaching disaster victims to be of any actual help. The formal mechanisms of global assistance constitute disaster management failure by design. Rather, it is the local experts who sustain human lives in the weeks and months before external aid comes to the rescue. Yet local communities' contributions to their own survival remain invisible to central government and the global arena. Traditional means of forecasting environmental catastrophes and of providing essential assistance in the aftermath of natural disasters are reflections of cultural values, socio-economic sophistication and scientific expertise within communities whose resilience needs to be recognized, assisted and promoted. Educational curricula of the future, involving a new generation of academicians, should integrate this crucial indigenous knowledge into the nation's mainstream disaster management framework.

Urban population growth has demonstrated synergetic relationship with the growth of informal settlements and disasters, especially in developing countries. The increase in the density of people in informal settlements in Tanzania has accelerated theirvulnerability to disaster risks. This study employs Community Participatory Disaster Risk and Vulnerability Assessment (PDRVA) to analyse vulnerability to disasters in informal settlements in Arusha city, Tanzania. The results show that a plethora offactors—human, physical, social, and economic—interact in a complex non-linear way to shape vulnerability to disasters in informal settlements in the city. Indigenous and western knowledge in the settlements used to cope with environmental hazards hold a great potential in shifting community responses to long-term considerations. The study recommends that measures and strategies aimed at reducing disaster risks should address the whole set of issues leading to poverty and disparities within thecommunity.

The impacts of natural disasters on communities living in hazard-prone areas are wide-ranging and complex, especially in Mwanza city where the landscape is characterized by highly dissected steep slopes, rock hills, narrow interfluves and river valleys in which the very poor in society mostly inhabit. The communities in such areas are prone to landslides, floods and storms that are triggered by weather and climatic changes over time and space. Over time communities in Mwanza city have accumulated traditional coping mechanisms for disaster risks and impact reduction. This paper explores local communities' understanding of causes and impacts of hazards and disasters using their own culture, and hence their capacity to recover. It is hypothesized that peoples' capacity to cope with nature-based disasters should hinge on a nuanced understanding of resilience of their socio-economic and ecological systems framework. The traditional technologies employed as pre- and post-disaster risk reduction measures are a reflection of a solid base for integrating with contemporary technologies in promoting resilience. In the long-term, combating poverty at individual, household, community and national levels will be crucial for enhancing resilience to hazards and disasters. A challenge to natural disaster risks reduction is how to initiate a research agenda on sustainable development policies and action plans that are disaster-risks-inclusive, with a focus on increased public awareness and enhancing resilience. Efforts to promote traditional technologies should, therefore, be directed to a school system where a new generation of academicians with access to modern-day knowledge may have an opportunity to integrate the two technologies for disaster risk reduction in various communities.

Losses from environmental flood hazards have escalated in the recent decades, prompting a reorientation of emergency management systems away from simple post-event response. The degree to which populations are vulnerable to flood hazards is not solely dependent upon proximity to the source of the threat or the physical nature of the hazard—social factors also play a significant role in determining vulnerability. This paper presents a participatory disaster risk method for assessing vulnerability in spatial terms using both physical and social indicators. It reveals that the most physically vulnerable places do not always spatially intersect with the most vulnerable populations. This is an important finding because it reflects the likely 'social costs' of hazards. While economic losses might be large in areas of high physical risk to floods, the resident population also may have greater safety nets (insurance, additional financial resources) to absorb and recover from the loss quickly. Conversely, it would take only a moderate hazard event to disrupt the well-being of the majority residents (who are more socially of vulnerable, but perhaps do not reside in the highest areas of physical risks to floods) and retard their longer-term recovery from disasters. This paper advances theoretical and conceptual understanding of the spatial dimensions of vulnerability. It further highlights the merger of conceptualizations of human-environment relationships with geographical techniques in understanding contemporary public policy issues.

Tanzania's President sent a plane to Madagascar in May 2020 to bring a shipment of Covid-Organics, a purported cure and prevention for COVID-19. The herbal remedy was described as a gift to help African countries in need. Drawing on preliminary data in English and Kiswahili from unstructured participant observation, social and legacy media available online and shared through contact channels, and ongoing conversations, we explore the Tanzanian policy response to COVID-19. What can the exemplary case of Covid Organics in Tanzania help us to understand about South-South humanitarian assistance (SSHA) in times of crisis? We suggest that Covid-Organics has enabled the government to project a link to latent debates about Pan-Africanism and Julius Nyerere's legacy and Madagascar's SSHA has provided an opportunity for a public reflection on Africa's place in the world. For some, the remedy's 'Africanness' is its comparative advantage, even promising a continental renaissance. For others, the lack of scientific evidence or approval by global health authorities like WHO is delegitimizing. These findings suggest that receivers of SSHA make sense of it in both a broad, post-colonial discursive context and in a specific context of local contestation. If the promise of this particular form of aid is its ability to transcend deep divisions between North and South, the case of Covid-Organics suggests that SSHA draws on deep ideologies of pan-Africanism; is increasingly important in crises that are global; and like other forms of humanitarianism, reflects elite politics and priorities rather than prioritizing the distribution of humanitarian goods and decreasing inequality.