Paper for Special Issue on Children and Disasters Children, Youth and Environments

It is 22:52 now and I have just finished my paper which is provisionally entitled: 'How children's vulnerability in disasters can be reduced by their involvement and empowerment through community based education and disaster prevention.' I have outlined briefly what vulnerability is and how it relates to disasters before examining flood hazard mapping in Japan which does not appear to include children and youth in its programme, before looking at two case studies in depth that illustrate how children's vulnerability can be reduced through their involvement and participation. One project was carried out on the island of Luzon in the Philippines and the other was the Plan El Salvador project.

Both seem to be very interesting and more importantly seem to be making an impact on reducing vulnerability across all sectors of the communities in which they have been carried out in. I am a little tired now, so I am going to go to bed with the new(ish) Terry Pratchet book (called 'Thud') and zone out for a bit!

Tsunami Education Comic

While working with form group we looked at different media techniques for educating people about geohazards such as earthquakes and tsunamis. I have put this image of the tsunami risk in comic form, on this blog, but I will also update it on the geo-world site soon as well!
Click here to view it!
While on the subject of education I have also posted my design for a portable shake table here »

On the subject of my paper, I'll get back to it later today, almost completed 3,000 words now so it is getting there!

I haven’t added an entry for a while because I have been busy writing the paper for the children youth and environment journal. I have made quite a bit of headway, I have examined:

• Some hazard and hazard vulnerability theories and practices
• A literature review
• Two projects - one in the Phillipines and the other in El Salvador which used CBDM as a way of engaging people. Project in Phillipines was about increasing populations capacity to cope with geo-hazard events.
• I am now examining the Plan International evaluation with a view to analysing its effectiveness in community hazard mapping and how this has contributed to better awareness and capacity for hazard events.

In terms of planning, etc I have found Sente very useful, have used the British Library a couple of times too examine documents and publications, including Andrew Maskrey etc.

I have downloaded a useful piece of software called ‘Curio’ which is incredibly useful for project management etc. I have used it to help me plan the paper I was talking about earlier as well as drawing up a model for hazards increasing vulnerability beacause the hazard forces or encourages people to engage in practices that worsen the impacts of hazards. I have created a pdf of file here is a link to it first