Improved Methods for Fire Risk Assessment in Low-Income and Informal Settlements.

Fires cause over 300,000 deaths annually worldwide and leave millions more with permanent injuries: some 95% of these deaths are in low- and middle-income countries. Burn injury risk is strongly associated with low-income and informal (or slum) settlements, which are growing rapidly in an urbanising world. Fire policy and mitigation strategies in poorer countries are constrained by inadequate data on incidence, impacts, and causes, which is mainly due to a lack of capacity and resources for data collection, analysis, and modelling. As a first step towards overcoming such challenges, this project reviewed the literature on the subject to assess the potential of a range of methods and tools for identifying, assessing, and addressing fire risk in low-income and informal settlements; the process was supported by an expert workshop at University College London in May 2016. We suggest that community-based risk and vulnerability assessment methods, which are widely used in disaster risk reduction, could be adapted to urban fire risk assessment, and could be enhanced by advances in crowdsourcing and citizen science for geospatial data creation and collection. To assist urban planners, emergency managers, and community organisations who are working in resource-constrained settings to identify and assess relevant fire risk factors, we also suggest an improved analytical framework based on the Haddon Matrix.

Attitude before method: disability in vulnerability and capacity assessment.

Many agencies working on disaster risk reduction use vulnerability and capacity assessment (VCA) to identify vulnerable groups, to assess their needs and capacities, and to develop appropriate programmes and policies. In theory, VCA offers a good opportunity to incorporate disabled people's needs and resources in counter-disaster programming. This paper seeks to establish and explain the extent to which disability is included in VCA in practice. It reviews VCA reports and findings, formal VCA guidance, and other methodological literature. The review indicates that disability is a neglected issue in VCA practice and that manuals and guidelines, while promoting the general ideal of inclusiveness, are insufficiently aware of the challenges to achieving this in practice and do not offer enough guidance on how to reach and include disabled people. Ways of overcoming these problems are suggested. However, the real challenge may be to change core attitudes and perceptions of disability within implementing organisations.