Risk, Ethics, and Law: A framework (E4Rs) to understand disasters, learned through response to earthquake disasters in Aotearoa New Zealand, Italy, and Nepal.

In disaster science, the discussions predominantly stem from the various notions of risk and associated concepts. While understanding risk is an undeniable necessity to comprehend disasters, it is inadequate. This is because, risk only provides an understanding of what is, but it doesn’t describe what could be done and what should be done. As such, there are additional parameters that needs to be included to fully capture the complexities of disaster risk reduction. To this end, it is argued that disasters need to be framed through additional lens of law and ethics that interact with the concepts of risk. A framework, termed Ethics for 4Rs (E4Rs) where 4Rs represent the 4 phases of disaster cycle (reduction, readiness, response, and recovery), is proposed where the three main concepts: risk, ethics, and law interact continuously. Additionally, this framework emphasizes the need to explicitly express the importance of our values, i.e., ethics as disasters are fraught with difficult decisions. This theoretical framework was derived based on understanding gained through studies on the use of post-earthquake cordons as a response and recovery strategy following major disasters in three countries: Aotearoa New Zealand (Christchurch earthquake 2011), Italy (L’Aquila earthquake 2009), and Nepal (Gorkha earthquake 2015). For the case studies, a qualitative research methodology was used for data collection, where 44 experts from varying backgrounds such as politicians, emergency managers, city council members, police, community leaders among others were interviewed. The development of this framework has also been supported through review of ethical concepts from health sciences, in particular public health sciences. This is because discussions on ethics in relation to disasters are limited in literature where as they have been developed more thoroughly in public health sciences. Although, there are differences in disasters due to natural hazards and public health events such as a pandemic, the complexity, urgency, scale and the need to make difficult decisions remain the same and are comparable. Finally, it is suggested that this framework will bring about discussion on disasters and ethics where a significant gap remains in the current disaster science discourse.