Assessing Vulnerability and Risk of Natural Disasters in My Community

Resilience planning is an important way that communities prepare for changes that are the result of natural disasters and climate change. In this activity, students identify places of value in their community and assess their vulnerability to a specific type of natural disaster that could affect them. They make a claim about which place is the most vulnerable, and assess the risk of those valued places in the community both now and in the future when risks may increase due to climate change. 

 

Learning Objectives

  • Students identify places that they value in their local area and assess their vulnerability to natural disasters.

  • Students determine what risk each place faces now and in the future.

Materials

Preparation

  • Make one copy of each student page for each student.
  • Research the types of natural disasters that can impact your community and choose one to focus on for this activity (e.g. drought, flooding, hurricanes, etc.)
  • Determine if your students need additional background learning about resilience, vulnerability, and the increased risk of natural disasters due to climate change. If your community is on the coast, consider activities from Hurricane Resilience or Project Resilience as preparation for this activity. 

Directions

Define resilience.

  1. Ask students to share what comes to mind when they hear the term 'resilience' and then share that resilience is the ability to bounce back from a shock or stress, acquire new capabilities, or handle changing conditions.
  2. Have students think of a time in their life when they have been resilient and share with a partner.
  3. Provide a more detailed definition of resilience.
    • Resilience is the capacity of individuals, communities, and systems to survive, adapt, and grow despite ongoing stresses and unexpected shocks. Adaptation is a piece of resilience and is defined as modifying how we live in a place to survive despite changing environmental conditions.
    • Note that resilience planning takes into account many different ways that people or communities are vulnerable (because of sinking land, changing economics, demographics, disease, etc.).
  4. Explain that natural disasters are something that communities can be vulnerable to, and that resilience planning is often focused on preparing for natural disasters. Ask students to think about the different types of natural disasters that affect their community. Make a list on the board to capture student ideas.
    • Tell students which type of natural disaster they will be focusing on for this activity.
  5. Ask students to share their ideas about ways that their community might be resilient to the natural disaster you have chosen to focus on. Record student ideas next to the list of natural disasters.

Assess vulnerability.

  1. Tell students that now they will identify places that they think are valuable in their community and then identify their vulnerability. Share that vulnerability means that something, some place, or someone is exposed or sensitive to harm.
  2. Hand out the student activity sheets and have them first complete the What’s Vulnerable? section by choosing five places in their community that they value. Orient students to the table on the student page by reviewing the column headings and directions as needed.
  3. Explain that to assess the vulnerability of these places, they will estimate how exposed certain places are and how sensitive the places and the people in those places are to a natural disaster.
  4. Note that filling in information will require that students make their best estimates - there is no one correct answer. 
    • For column D, students should estimate whether the people are likely to be negatively affected by the natural disaster. Provide examples for students of how some people may be more vulnerable than others (e.g., those who lack the financial resources, don't have a car, or have a disability that would make it difficult to prepare or recover if they are faced with certain types of natural disasters). This is called social vulnerability.
    • Students will then calculate the vulnerability rating in column E.
  5. After calculating a vulnerability rating for their five places, students should identify the most vulnerable place they found. Have them complete the Which Place is Most Vulnerable In My Community? section of the student sheets by making a claim, citing evidence, and explaining their reasoning for why it is the most vulnerable.
  6. Have students share which places they claim to be most vulnerable and why.
    • As students share, ask them to describe their evidence and reasoning to support their claim. (If short on time, have students work in groups of three to five to share their most vulnerable location, evidence, and reasoning.)
    • To add a geography component, mark each vulnerable location on a map as students share their evidence and reasoning.

Determine risk.

  1. Tell students that vulnerability to a natural disaster, combined with the consequences if the event occurred, and the probability of the event, adds up to risk.
  2. Have students complete the What’s the Risk? section to assess the consequences if the places they value were destroyed. They will calculate the risk of a natural disaster now and in the future, when the probability of harm will be higher due to changing environmental conditions brought on by climate change.
  3. When orienting students to the student page, facilitate a discussion to help students decide what they feel distinguishes between high/med/low consequences: the number of people impacted, the importance of the service provided (for example a hospital being destroyed versus a home), the monetary value, the uniqueness, etc.
    • Remind students that, in this exercise, they are comparing the relative risk of different places. (The numbers used in the student page calculations are only meaningful in comparison with the numbers for other locations.)
  4. Explain why the risk now might be different than the risk in 2050. Help students make connections between the type of natural disaster you are focusing on and how the warming climate is increasing the risk of these disasters. For hurricanes, warmer ocean temperatures leads to more severe tropical storms. For drought and wildfire, climate change is increasing periods of hot, dry weather. For flooding, changing weather patterns due to climate warming are causing more flooding in communities that reside along waterways and the coast.

Sensemaking

  1. Facilitate a class discussion of the following questions.
    • What trends do you notice when comparing the risk now to future risk (columns C & D)?
    • What is different between the places with the highest risk values and the lowest?
    • Can you accept the risks of this type of natural disaster now? How about future risks?
      • Tell students that there isn’t a correct level of risk, that everyone is different in the way they perceive risk, so no two people will have exactly the same idea about how much risk is too much. What’s most important is to know how much risk you feel comfortable with.
    • Which places are most in need of help in order to reduce risk (now and in the future)?
      • Note that to reduce risk, we can take actions that make us and the places that we value less vulnerable.

Extension

  • As follow up to this activity, have students learn about or brainstorm actions that people in their community can take to reduce risk and be more resilient.
  • If your community has a resilience plan already, allow students to explore the plan and list actions that would affect their school or their families.
  • If your community does not have a resilience plan, have students learn about creating one and go through the process of creating a plan. You could even have them present their plan to peers, school leadership, or the community. The Hurricane Resilience curriculum linked in the preparation section of this activity contains resilience planning activities that you could adapt for your students.