Here is your short paragraph on vulnerability!
Hazards and disasters are unevenly distributed with respect to time and space. The terms like ‘earthquake prone’, ‘drought prone’ or ‘flood prone’ areas are used to describe the distributional effect of the concerned hazards.
People living in such areas are vulnerable to hazards and disasters of varied types.
Thus vulnerability is the extent to which an individual or a community or an area is exposed to the impact of a hazard. According to National Institute of Disaster Management (formerly National Centre for Disaster Management), Vulnerability is defined as the extent to which a community, structure, service or geographic area is likely to be damaged or disrupted by the impact of particular hazard on account of either nature, construction and proximity to hazardous terrain or disaster prone area.
ADVERTISEMENTS:
Thus, vulnerability implies a measure of risk combined with the level of social and economic ability to cope with the resulting event in order to resist major disruption or loss. In other words, vulnerability is “a set of prevailing or consequential conditions composed of physical, socio-economic and/or political factors which increase a community’s susceptibility to calamity or which adversely affect its ability to respond to events.”
Vulnerability incorporates both the intrinsic value of the elements concerned and their functional value in contributing to communal well being in general and to emergency response and post-disaster recovery in particular. The concept of vulnerability therefore implies a measure of risk combined with the level of social and economic ability to cope with the resulting event in order to resist major disruption or loss.