MAJOUR CHARACTERISTICS OF DISASTER RISK AND ITS MANAGEMENT STRATEGIES

Human activities play an important role on the process in which a natural phenomenon, such as an earthquake and a flood, is become to a "disaster" which causes losses and damages in the society. The paper focuses on the relationships between disaster risks and human activities in order to investigate the characteristics of the disaster risk and effective way of its risk management. "Low-frequency" is focused as the first characteristic of the disaster risk. It is pointed out that this feature of the risk brings about biases of risk/vulnerability perception and that land-use regulation is necessary in order to achieve efficient land-use patterns and/or risk communication is required to reduce such perception biases. "Collectiveness of the risk" is highlighted as the second characteristic. A catastrophic event brings about spatially correlated distribution of (direct) losses in the society. Namely, its loss distribution is locally concentrated but it has spillover effect over space and time. The paper investigates implication of this feature by referring the past studies and point out the importance of collaborative actions between regions. Finally, the paper proposes a new public risk management framework to implement effective risk management strategies in the society. Language: ja