This Guide provides an introduction to the use of environmental protection and disaster risk reduction as practices critical for promoting sustainable development, and then proceeds to indicate how these are applicable at the community level. Examples of some of the successes achieved by African communities are used to demonstrate how these principles can be applied.Disasters occur when hazards severely affect vulnerable communities or natural ecosystems beyond their coping capacity, and can result from both natural and human-induced hazards. Their impact upon human settlements makes them one of the most important challenges for the international community to address. Managing and reducing disaster risk is important to safeguard the welfare of people and the environment, and as such, environmental protection goes hand-in-hand with disaster risk management.
The Guide considers how sound environmental protection can help to reduce the vulnerability of both the natural environment, human settlements and enterprises to hazards, as well as bolstering their capacity to absorb the impacts of disaster events.