In recent years, the world has been hit with a series of massive natural disasters, from Hurricane Katrina in USA, earthquakes in Haiti and Asia, the tsunami in country, the earthquake and tsunami in Japan, extremely cold winter in Europe. With the increase of natural disasters that have occurred within the past years it’s expected their frequency will still increase within the coming years.
A natural disaster is the effect of a natural hazard (e.g., flood, tornado, hurricane, volcanic eruption, earthquake, heatwave or landslide) [1]. It leads to financial, environmental or human losses. Natural disasters come without warning and that they take lives of tens, hundreds and thousands of individuals. The resulting loss depends on the vulnerability of the affected population to resist the hazard, also referred to as their resilience.
If these disasters continue it would be a great danger for the world. This understanding is concentrated in the formulation that disasters occur once hazards meet vulnerability. Thus a natural hazard can not end in a natural disaster in areas without vulnerability, e.g. strong earthquakes in uninhabited areas. The term natural has consequently been disputed as a result of the events merely are not hazards or disasters without human involvement.
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The term ‘social media’ embraces blogs, micro-blogs, social book-marking, social networking, forums, collaborative creation of documents and the sharing of audio, photographic and video files. It is characterised by interactive communication, in which message content is changed between people, audiences, organisations and sectors of the general public.
Social media usage is, to some extent, negatively correlated with age and positively with instructional attainment. For example, people over the age of fifty five tend to like standard sources of news. The degree of adoption of social media varies from country to country but is typically dynamic in most environments and therefore any outline statistics are prone to become obsolete rapidly. Attempts to relate social media to personality factors have instructed that they are most engaging to individuals, of both sexes, who are comparatively extrovert, but there is no indication of the extent to which any effort to develop profiles of users may well be culturally conditioned.
Due to natural disasters there’s an increased communication since individuals get to contact family and friends within the disasters zone, and seek data concerning food, shelter and transportation. Social media has played a vital role in distributive data regarding these disasters by permitting individuals to share data and raise help. Social media are additionally turning into vital resources to recovery efforts once crises, when infrastructure should be restored and stress management is important.
The extensive reach of social networks permits individuals who are recovering from disasters to rapidly connect with required resources. There are tons of groups in the preferred social networking sites, allowing people concerned in varied aspects of emergency awareness and preparation to connect, discuss, and share knowledge in specific fields.
References
- World Health Organization – Natural Events
- United Nations – International Day for Disaster Reduction
- NASA Earth Observatory – Disaster Predictions
- US Geological Survey – Natural Hazards
- National Center for Biotechnology Information – Impact of Natural Disasters on Human Health and Mental Well-being
- National Geographic Society – Resource Library: Natural Disasters and Climate Change
