Exploring disaster risk reduction through community level approaches to promote healthy outcomes: Proceedings of a workshop
On April 21, 2016, the Health and Medicine Division of the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine convened a workshop during the 2016 Preparedness Summit in the United States of America. Participants discussed the concepts of disaster risk reduction (DRR), their application within U.S. communities through novel and contemporary practices, and specific strategies that can be implemented at the local level through cross-sector collaboration.
Recommendations made for mobilizing communities to take on DRR as an important activity are as follows:
- integrating DRR policies and strategies into day-to-day operations could mitigate some of the challenges and hesitancy of leaders to get involved;
- building off of neighborhood watches or community associations;
- working within already existing social networks;
- having measures of effectiveness from state or federal government agencies that could help secure buy-in and demonstrate the importance of DRR;
- while the best process for lowering risks will be different in each community, the concept of cultural prevention can be applied to all sorts of hazards.