ABSTRACT
This chapter provides an overview of challenges for those engaging with disaster risk, including the challenge of understanding and the challenge of loss. The latter discusses cultural and psychological loss, livelihood loss, and monetary and materials loss. This chapter’s treatment of the challenge of understanding includes an exposition of the dominant Western paradigm that juxtaposes risk, hazard, and vulnerability, a critique of that Western paradigm, and a review of alternative, cross-cultural ways of knowing disaster risk. The task is not just to understand but to inform action to reduce suffering. We want to place disaster in a context, to frame it, and to tease out its elements and how they combined to produce injury, death, and loss. To do this, we may have to address any myths, such as the universality of the Western perspective, as well as misinformation or lies by people with power who may want the root causes of disaster risk to remain obscure.
