Cyclones and disaster management
Disaster management needs to be a long-term, multi-sector responsibility which interacts with, and contributes significantly to, national development. It should be intimately concerned with the root causes of community vulnerability to hazards, and these root causes are inevitably the targets of development programmes. Expert knowledge gained through studies of cyclones is not only relevant to disaster management, but is an important component and crucial to its success. This article outlines some of the disaster management strategies that all of us should be trying to implement so that cyclones have less potential for harm. The article also shows the importance of cyclone related studies, in the proper context, to each of these strategies.