The nature and health of a community’s natural environment play a critical role in determining what hazards could affect their mitigation, response, and recovery strategies. Through this, the health and nature of a community’s natural environment influence the social and building systems of the community. For instance, a community located in a coastal area increases its vulnerability to natural disasters like severe storms or hurricanes. However, the nature of this community also impacts social systems since it provides several recreational and commercial resources (Hyatt, 2018). On the other hand, a community located far from the coastal area is not vulnerable to this disaster. Therefore, depending on the natural environment of a community, social and building systems could either be strong or weak and vulnerable to a disaster.
In addition to this, the health of the community’s environment determines how resilient the community is to disasters. The healthier the environment, the more resilient the community will be and the stronger the social and building systems. A good example of this is the availability of clean water resources, as it ensures the sustainability of the community by providing a protective shield for them. Healthy forests are also less vulnerable to catastrophic wildfires aside from reducing landslide dangers on slopes. However, if a community’s natural environment is unhealthy, it reduces its social and building capacities. On the contrary, a stressed or damaged environment could easily increase the dire consequences of the hazard on the community (Pine, 2015). For example, a community affected by floods could incur indirect secondary effects. This is because a flood could destroy wetlands covering them with erosion or even turn productive channels and swamps into a sterile water feature.
However, the influence of the nature and health of a community’s natural environment on the social and building systems varies for different disasters. A healthy environment does not necessarily mean disasters will be mitigated. This is because certain disasters like manmade disasters cannot be prevented by a healthy environment. The best mitigation plan is building the community assets to withhold manmade disasters. For instance, developing policies for people not to settle in mining areas will reduce the chances of experiencing landslides. Furthermore, different disasters required different healthy environments. An area that has healthy trees will mitigate events like a natural wildfire but it may fail to reduce the risk of getting floods. As such, the resilience of the community towards particular hazards is dependent on a specific natural environment.
Additionally, with the changes occurring in the world such as global warming, it has become unpredictable to assess certain events like floods. In this case, an area may experience heavy rain hence causing floods within the area and damaging properties. The scenario cannot be fully prevented by a healthy environment like regions with a lot of trees. The only place that can sustain the hazard is a wetland. Therefore, depending on the type of hazard, communities cannot have the capacity to resist it even in a healthy environment.
Furthermore, disasters influenced by technology like dam failure cannot be prevented by a healthy environment. This is because they occur suddenly and without warning to the people affected. A dam failure causes a flash flood that greatly causes harm to the people and their property. In this event, a healthy environment may limit the effect but not fully prevent it. This is because the flash flood might destroy the wetlands through erosion thus making the communities vulnerable.
References
Hyatt, N. (2018). Guidelines for process hazards analysis (PHA, HAZOP), hazards identification, and risk analysis. CRC press.
Pine, J. (2015). Hazards Analysis Reducing the Impact of Disasters (2nd ed., Chp. 2, pp. 29-57). CRC Press. (5)