Management of natural disasters in the Brazilian Amazon region

Author

Claudio Szlafsztein (iosele@ufpa.br)

Natural Hazards: Journal of the International Society for the Prevention and Mitigation of Natural Hazards, 2015, vol. 76, issue 3, pages 1745-1757

Abstract: We describe and analyze the legal, institutional, and financial dimensions of risk management in the Brazilian Amazon region, principally in the states of Acre, Amazonas, and Para and the factors that contribute to the definition of the challenges for a successful natural disaster management there. The analysis classifies the normative instruments used in sustainable development, territorial zoning, risk management, climate change, and water resources issues and identifies the state government organizations involved with disaster risk management, which are classified according to a proposed thematic–temporal–task responsibilities relationship model. State-level administrators were also interviewed. We found that states are responsible for the provision of protection and assistance to the population, roles conducted by the police and the firefighting corps and that legal instruments can indirectly assist with the reduction of vulnerability factors. Most of the institutional states’ structures have a direct relationship with disaster risk management and show a predominance of post-disasters implementation and control of policies and activities. Monetary resource transfers from the federal government to states are a mixture of voluntary and mandatory. However, by examining the national and state budgets of 2013 and 2014, it is clear that much of the financing of risk management comes from extraordinary resources. The answers given by the managers of state government institutions are categorized as risk management perception and coordination, and financial, institutional, and data challenges, all of which are faced in the Amazon region. Thus, this paper expects to contribute to the understanding of one of the most important forms of disaster risk response capacity and to the reduction of the vulnerability of the states studied. Copyright Springer Science+Business Media Dordrecht 2015

Keywords: Natural disasters; Risk management; Amazon region; Public policies (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2015
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations Track citations by RSS feed

Downloads: (external link)
http://hdl.handle.net/10.1007/s11069-014-1567-8 (text/html)
Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link:http://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:spr:nathaz:v:76:y:2015:i:3:p:1745-1757

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.springer.com/economics/journal/11069

Access Statistics for this article

Natural Hazards: Journal of the International Society for the Prevention and Mitigation of Natural Hazards is currently edited by Thomas Glade, Tad S. Murty and Vladimír Schenk

More articles in Natural Hazards: Journal of the International Society for the Prevention and Mitigation of Natural Hazards from  Springer, International Society for the Prevention and Mitigation of Natural Hazards
Series data maintained by Sonal Shukla (sonal.shukla@springer.com).

For further details log on website :
http://econpapers.repec.org/scripts/search.pf?kw=Amazon