ABSTRACT
As discussed at the end of Chapter 7, mitigation activities are often interwoven into disaster recovery activities as the recovery process is generally an opportune time for implementing disaster mitigation measures. Disaster mitigation has been defined as “[t]he capabilities necessary to reduce loss of life and property by lessening the impact of disasters” (United States Department of Homeland Security 2013, 1). GIS can play a particularly important role in disaster mitigation activities through the modeling of hazard and risk scenarios to identify potential physical, virtual, and social vulnerabilities, that can ideally be mitigated or reduced through increased resilience efforts. As an example using earthquake risks, GIS data layers can be created that inventory housing characteristics such as building material and structural types in relation to the location of earthquake fault lines
and landslide risks to determine how vulnerable the built environment is to a potential earthquakes (Kemp et al., 2008; Environmental Systems Research Institute, 2007). Making such determinations can then be used to inform decision making as to which buildings might require additional reinforcements to withstand earthquakes or will require higher insurance to recover losses in the event of an earthquake.
