Methodology

The Social Studies Network for Disaster Prevention in LatinAmerica was incorporated in 1992, in his Research agent and Internal Organization Statutes (LA RED, COMECSO/ITDG, Lima, January, 1993) was stablished that:

Population growth and urbanization processes, trends in land use, increasing impoverishment of significant segments of the population, use of inappropriate technological systems in the construction of houses and basic infrastructure, and inappropriate organization systems, amongst others, are factors that have increased the vulnerability of the population vis-a-vis the wide diversity of physical and natural events.

DesInventar Methodological Guide

However, lack of systematic, homogeneous, and compatible records of disaster typologies, understood as the effect of the occurrence of threatening events on the vulnerability of each region, country or city, on the one hand, and insistence on considering disasters only as effects of detonation factors (events) of huge proportions and high impact, on the other, have hidden the thousands of small and medium scale disasters that occur every year in regions such as Latin American, The Caribbean, Asia and Africa.

Also, institutions and researchers of a number of countries are interested in this subject. But unfortunately, they use different tools to systematize the information on disasters specially databases or physical files - designed on the basic of specific or sectorial criteria, and using different formats. Besides, there is a huge volume of information pending compilation and systematization, specifically in graphic material.

This dispersed information must be compiled, compatibilized and analyzed. But it must also be geographically referenced, since disasters (affected communities and infrastructure) due to the effects of each type of detonation factor (threat) are regionalized variables.

A common objective in many regions and countries (in Latin America, the Caribbean, Asia and Africa) is to create the capacity to analyze and represent hazards, vulnerabilities, and risk in terms of space and time, both retrospectively and prospectively; and the purpose of this capacity is its application in risk management, whose activities go from mitigation to post-disaster attention and recovery.