Museums for Disaster Risk Reduction
Museums for Disaster Risk Reduction
How can museums build resilience in society, and in museums themselves?
What’s the situation?
People, places, nature, and museums all face various kinds of hazard. The presence of hazards doesn’t necessarily result in damage or the loss of abilities or resources. Nor do we just have to wait for a disaster to come along till we make our response. Disaster Risk Reduction is an ongoing process that helps us look around, look forward, and take proactive steps that strengthen our abilities to deal with challenges, and to reduce challenges as far as we can.
A key concept in DRR is that there is no such thing as a natural disaster: disasters are human, social and policy failings to meet the realities we are presented with.
Connecting DRR to museums:
My work on DRR and museums has two main goals:
- To help museums build their resilience, and reduce the impact of disasters on museums themselves.
- To help museums contribute to resilience-building in the wider world, for the benefit of society and the natural environment.
The Sendai Framework for Disaster Risk Reduction was launched in 2015, along with the SDGs and the Paris Agreement. It goes beyond emergency response, to ongoing identification, prevention and capacity building to meet the many challenges we are faced with. In 2020, I wrote a guide connecting the Ten Essentials of Resilience (a framework that supports the Sendai Framework) with the framework I set out in Museums and the Sustainable Development Goals (2019). Museums can embed DRR in their goals, plans, actions and monitoring.
The Ten Essentials of Resilience are:
- Organize for disaster resilience. Put in place an organizational structure with strong leadership and clarity of coordination and responsibilities.
- Identify, understand, and use current and future risk scenarios.
- Strengthen financial capacity for resilience.
- Pursue resilient urban development and design.
- Safeguard natural buffers to enhance the protective functions offered by natural ecosystems.
- Strengthen institutional capacity for resilience.
- Understand and strengthen societal capacity for resilience.
- Increase infrastructure resilience.
- Ensure effective preparedness and disaster response.
- Expedite recovery and build back better.
“Disaster Risk Reduction approaches help museums contribute to society’s resilience, and build the resilience of museums too”
What this means for you:
You can make use of the Ten Essentials of Resilience, and connect them to your organisation’s work, using the guide as a template. You can also develop your understanding of the difference between hazard and risk, and that risk reduction is often about reducing vulnerability rather than reducing the existence of hazards.
Museums can play very strong, concrete roles, that help people understand past, present and current sources of risk; prepare for serious events; and generally strengthen skills, networks and other capacities, and reduce hazards, exposure and vulnerability.
Whether you are considering resilience-building in relation to your organisation, or your community or nature, DRR is a fantastic approach to use.
How Curating Tomorrow can support you:
Curating Tomorrow can help you understand and apply DRR approaches to your own work, organisation or network, through:
- Understanding the potential of collections to contribute to DRR, for example through public education or awareness activities
- Speaking at conferences
- Online and/or in-person workshops for staff or groups of staff
- Advice
- Strategy, policy and plan development
- Contributing to public-facing activities (exhibitions, events, consultations) on Disaster Risk Reduction