Risk at the Margins (RAM): a blueprint for defragmenting disaster risk reduction with populations at risk

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The burden of disasters remains grossly unequal: they disproportionately and repeatedly impact the most vulnerable populations in low- and middle- income countries. Thus, we wish to find a way to improve how we address community disaster risk in those contexts. Poor progress in reducing the impacts on lives, livelihoods and sustainable development that natural hazards have on populations in developing countries has been attributed to a weak focus on 'prospective practice' in addressing resilience to multiple hazards. In other words a lack of methods and strategies that allow people to adapt to, cope with or avoid the accumulation of future risk while undergoing sustainable development. Current academic and development practices are largely siloed, which means they focus on individual hazards, or approaches that are either focussed on understanding and warning people about the hazards, or on understanding how communities can be vulnerable and acting to change that. For example, hazard specialists often frame their analysis of risks 'upstream' on the basis of physical drivers rather than 'downstream' on social and environmental impacts. Those whose analysis focuses on vulnerability outcomes can overlook the way that hazards can change and radically reshape the nature of exposure. This fragmentation creates situations where problems and solutions commonly are not effectively aligned, and it becomes much harder for populations at risk to implement strategies that adapt, cope with or avoid future risk (prospective practice). This problem remains despite a growing recognition of the value that interdisciplinary engagement would bring in solving this. We aim to address this by bringing together a wide grouping of GCRF and other related projects to drop the disconnect between scientific-technical solutions to disaster risk and projects that address the fundamental social vulnerabilities (the first stage). We will use this in order to develop methods and strategies that encourage prospective practice (to develop in the second stage). We will use the lens of extensive hazards to address this challenge during the first stage. Extensive hazards (those experienced for long periods or more intensely in smaller geographic areas - e.g. drought, ashfall, landsliding, pollution) can generate negative outcomes that are more damaging to sustainable development than infrequent high cost events, particularly for populations with other vulnerabilities. We think that extensive hazards need a multi-hazard approach to their characterisation and monitoring, and that their mitigation could be considered from the point of view of their impacts on the local populations: they need a joined up approach. We will begin by focussing on three 'design challenges' in places where we understand the social, political and cultural context and have identified projects that could benefit from this joined-up approach. These are in Nepal, St Vincent and Ecuador and, importantly, will be grounded by community groupings in situ. We will evaluate how we answer that and wrap around a broader review of the integration gap and how, why and when it is important to overcome. These processes will create 'a safe space' where we can discuss failures as well as successes and air suspicions arising from different ways of working, experiences or perspectives. We will create new solutions in our focus areas, and synthesise the findings across the project (by working together and the consultation represented in the review). This develops a blueprint for prospective practice that will understand how to: (1) monitor, characterise and mitigate extensive hazard from the perspective of those who experience them; (2) how to situate extensive hazards in the context of everyday risk challenges and policies for sustainable development. We will use this in the second stage project and to inform two new projects that begin during our first stage.