The Disaster Forensic Investigations Approach – Understanding root causes and disaster risk drivers to enhance DRR

The objective of this learning lab is to introduce participants to the FORIN method that has shown its efficacy in the past and will have been updated during the 9 months prior to the Global Platform, taking advantage of past experience to make it more in tune with the current DRR challenge and development context. FORIN can be applied to reveal deep-rooted causal factors and more immediate risk drivers, as opposed to the practice of overconcentration on more immediate final causes of disaster loss and damage. Thus, for example, it is not sufficient to explain hospital loss and damage by establishing that earthquake-resistant techniques were not used in project design and development. The question goes much further and requires analysis of management processes, including the impact of cost considerations, bad design, and corruption, amongst other factors.

The event will involve participants in understanding and promoting wider use of the method in the future, increasing  its impact on government, private sector, and civil society practice. The Learning Lab will run a group activity in which the audience is divided into multi-stakeholder groups, which are then presented with a fictious or real disaster scenario and details as to losses and damage and their distribution socially and economically, along with basic information on preexisting governance attributes and problems with instrumentation, social class divisions and locations etc. This will be the basis for intragroup discussions on risk construction processes that may have existed in the disaster case studied. The alternative explanations offered would then be considered regarding governmental needs and past failures. This will then provide the basis for disaggregation of certain aspects of the FORIN method that can be subjected to collective participatory discussion.

The Learning Lab will feature speakers from the Network for the Social Study of Disaster Prevention in Latin America (LA RED), the UN System and the NOAA Climate Program. In addition, practitioners from the National Disaster Management/Resilience and Research organizations will talk about how they applied FORIN in practice to set the stage for the group activity.

Main target audience:

• Policy makers and DRR practitioners in charge of assessing risk, specifically vulnerability and exposure diving into root causes and drivers of risk.