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Emergency Decision Making and Disaster Recovery

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Emergency Decision Making and Disaster Recovery Emergency Decision Making and Disaster Recovery Zur Erlangung des akademischen Grades eines Doktors der Ingenieurwissenschaften (Dr.-Ing.) von der KIT-Fakultät für Wirtschaftswissenschaften des Karlsruher Instituts für Technologie (KIT) genehmigte DISSERTATION von Farnaz Mahdavian, M.Eng. Tag der mündlichen Prüfung 14. Dezember 2020 Referent: Prof. Dr. Frank Schultmann Korreferent: Prof. Dr. Friedemann Wenzel Acknowledgment Foremost I would like to express my sincere gratitude to my supervisor Prof. Frank Schultmann and my advisor Dr Marcus Wiens for the continues support of my PhD research and their input in the last four years, and to my doctoral exam committee, Prof. Wenzel, Prof. Mitusch, Prof. Grothe, and of course Prof. Schultmann. I would like to acknowledge Karlsruhe House of Young Scientist for the three years scholarship and DAAD program STIBET for one year scholarship, without which I would not have been able to pursue my education in the field I love. Also, CNDS/EGU Summer School in Uppsala, Sweden and Alumni Seminar by TH Köln and TU Kaiserslautern, where improved my knowledge and awareness of Disaster Risk Reduction. I would like to express my deepest appreciation to Dr Stephen Platt who has supported me with his knowledge and positive attitude both in academic and personal level in the last few years, and to Dr Andrew Coburn, Dr Simon Ruffle and Mr Oliver Carpenter at Cambridge University, Judge Business School for providing me the amazing opportunity to work with the Center for Risk Studies and gain the experience that supported my doctoral research. My special thanks to Prof. David Alexander at University College London and Dr Albrecht A. Beck at Prepared International, and Prof. Alexander Fekete at TH Köln – University of Applied Sciences, for their advice and unsurpassed knowledge which helped me to develop further my research ideas, and to Dr Parisa Ariatabar who kindly accompanied me and supported my data collection in Germany. I am so thankful to be surrounded by incredible friends and colleagues, Marcus, Peyman, Miriam, Florian D., Florian K., Markus, Rebecca, Rebekka, Christoph, Rafael, Emil, Lisa, Saskia, Sara, Sabrina, Kira, Phuong, Elias, Hanns-Maximilian, Sascha, Saleh, Annet and Fariba. Not only I have learned so many things from you for my research, but also you have made my life more exciting and joyful. I would have never been this happy today, if I wouldn’t meet every single one of you. I am incredibly grateful for all the unconditional support and love my parents Abbas and Nasrin gave me, and my sister and brother who have always believed in me and brought me up with love and encouragement during all phases of my life. To Walter and Cristina, who always gave me confidence and peace. I am so lucky and thankful to have you all in my life. Finally, I am most grateful to my dearest partner Daniel, who has always been at my side during all the ups and downs in the last few years. You gave me the strength to overcome all the challenges and supported me to think and act better. Every second of my life is more beautiful on your side. Farnaz Mahdavian Karlsruhe, Germany December 2020 Abstract There is growing evidence that the number and severity of natural disasters and their cascading events such as power blackouts are increasing. These extreme events threaten human lives, displace hundreds of thousands of people and cause huge financial losses. Therefore, it is important to understand better how socio-economic systems can best respond to these disasters and how they can recover quickly, build back better and become more resilient. This thesis comprises five separate studies of four different types of disasters. The overall objective is to improve the understanding of how society copes with and makes decisions in crisis and emergency situations, and how disaster affected areas recover, particularly in terms of speed and quality. This is a huge subject and rather than focusing on just one event or a single type of disaster, the objective is to look at different types of disaster events by studying people’s risk perception and their (real or expected) disaster behaviour in the context of different phases of the disaster cycle from immediate response to longer-term recovery and resilience building. The five studies featured in this thesis are: 1. Behaviour during a long-lasting blackout in France and Germany, investigated through role-playing scenario exercises to study how society would cope. The aim is provide information to emergency managers and policy makers about community needs and people’s likely behaviour in future blackouts, 2. Analyses of people’s preparedness, perception and behaviour during floods in the UK and Germany and their attitude to public authorities, investigated through face-to-face interview surveys with people living and working in the flood prone areas, 3. Analyses of flood evacuation compliance, from both decision-theoretic and game-theoretic perspectives, using the Warning Compliance Model, which incorporates a Bayesian information system that formalizes the statistical effects of a warning forecast based on the harmonious structure of a Hidden Markov Model, 4. Examining recovery after two major comparable floods in UK and Germany in terms of the impacts, levels of preparedness and government response, investigated with face-to-face interview surveys with residents and businesses and online surveys with experts, 5. Tourist destination recovery in the Philippines after earthquake and typhoon, investigated through interviews with tourist managers and stakeholders. The key areas for future research revolve around identifying in more detail and with greater precision those factors that predispose a society to respond effectively to a disaster, to recover as quickly as possible and to build resilience in order to better confront future disasters. i List of included articles 1. Mahdavian, F.; Platt, S.; Wiens, M.; Klein, M.; Schultmann, F. (2020a): Communication blackouts in power outages: Findings from scenario exercises in Germany and France. In International Journal of Disaster Risk Reduction 46, p. 101628. DOI: 10.1016/j.ijdrr.2020.101628. © 2019 Elsevier. Reprinted with permission 2. Mahdavian, F.; Wiens, M.; Platt, S.; Schultmann, F. (2020b): Risk behaviour and people's attitude towards public authorities – A survey of 2007 UK and 2013 German floods. In International Journal of Disaster Risk Reduction, p. 101685. DOI: 10.1016/j.ijdrr.2020.101685. © 2019 Elsevier. Reprinted with permission 3. Wiens, M.; Mahdavian, F.; Platt, S.; Schultmann, F.(2020): Optimal Evacuation- Decisions Facing the Trade-Off between Early-Warning Precision, Evacuation-Cost and Trust – the Warning Compliance Model (WCM). In Working Paper Series in Production and Energy. DOI: 10.5445/IR/1000125578 4. Platt, S.; Mahdavian, F.; Carpenter, O.; Wiens, M.; Schultmann, F. (2020): Were the floods in the UK 2007 and Germany 2013 game-changers? In Philosophical transactions,Royal Society. Series A, Mathematical, physical, and engineering sciences 378 (2168). DOI: 10.1098/rsta.2019.0372. 5. Khazai, B.; Mahdavian, F.; Platt, S. (2018): Tourism Recovery Scorecard (TOURS) – Benchmarking and monitoring progress on disaster recovery in tourism destinations. In International Journal of Disaster Risk Reduction 27, pp. 75–84. DOI: 10.1016/j.ijdrr.2017.09.039. © 2019 Elsevier. Reprinted with permission ii Table of contents Abstract ................................................................................................................................................... i List of included articles ........................................................................................................................ ii Table of contents .................................................................................................................................. iii List of figures ......................................................................................................................................... v List of tables........................................................................................................................................... v Part A: Overview .................................................................................................................................. 1 1. Motivation .......................................................................................................................................... 2 2. Introduction ........................................................................................................................................ 2 3. Definitions and background of disaster management ........................................................................ 3 3.1 Hazard and disaster ....................................................................................................................... 3 3.2 Disaster risk management (DRM) and Disaster risk reduction (DRR) ......................................... 5 3.3 Disaster management cycle ........................................................................................................... 6 3.3.1 Phase 1 – Pre-disaster ............................................................................................................ 9 3.3.2 Phase 2 – Disaster Impact/Response ...................................................................................... 9 3.3.3 Phase 3 – Post-disaster ..........................................................................................................
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