Editing Governance Nigeria (section)

== '''Assessing Nigeria’s Resilience and Disaster Management Plans''' ==


Globally, the impacts of disasters have risen rapidly in recent decades affecting almost all sectors of the affected countries/Nation. Annually, several hundred millions of people are affected and as of 2011, the losses have reached a record US$ 371 billion. During the first semester of 2015, EM-DAT preliminary data shows that 138 disasters occurred in 68 countries. The impact of this resulted in 15,143 deaths, affected more than 15 million people, and caused more than US$13.2 billion. A figure that might underreport the true losses by 50% or more and does not include knock-on impacts across economies and relative economic impacts on individual and particularly poor families is also underestimated. A disaster can be a serious disruption of the normal functioning of a community or a society causing widespread human, material, economic, or environmental losses that exceed the ability of the affected community/society to cope using its resources. But in some areas of the world, frequent smaller-scale and unreported events are a major source of aggregate loss, especially in developing countries and poor communities. 

Disaster is a function of the risk process, and results from the combination of hazards, conditions of vulnerability, and insufficient capacity or measures or even interest to reduce the potential negative consequences of risk, and exposure. Understanding the interaction between hazards, exposure, and vulnerability is crucial to effective disaster prevention. The UNDP defines risk as the probability of harmful consequences — casualties, damaged property, lost livelihoods, disrupted economic activity, and environmental damage — resulting from interactions between natural or human-induced hazards and vulnerable conditions. It further described Risk assessment as a process to determine the nature and extent of such risk, by analyzing hazards. and evaluating existing conditions of vulnerability that together could potentially harm exposed people, property, services, livelihoods and the environment on which they depend.