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Risk represents the potential for loss as a result of the impact of natural, technological, and other hazards (see Chapter 1). More specifically, risk can be defined as ‘a situation or event in which something of human value (or humans themselves) has been put at stake and where the outcome is uncertain’ (Jaeger et al. 2001).

There are two main categories of definitions of ‘disaster risk’.

1 Disaster risk is a combination or function of hazard, exposure, and vulnerability. ‘Hazard’ is defined in Chapter 1. According to UNISDR (2017), ‘exposure’ is ‘the situation of people, infrastructure, housing, production capacities and other tangible human assets located in hazard-prone areas’. UNISDR (2017) defines ‘vulnerability’ as ‘the conditions determined by physical, social, economic, and environmental factors or processes which increase the susceptibility of an individual, a community, assets or systems to the impacts of hazards’. Exposure describes what could be harmed by hazards while vulnerability explains why it is in harm's way (Kelman 2018).

2 The combination (sometimes as a product) of the probability of an event and the consequences of the event.

Although there are these two categories of definitions, ‘the core concept within the definition of “disaster risk” does not really change over time or across different references, referring to overlapping notions of either: (1) possible losses from a hazard; or (2) potential adverse consequences in a disaster’ (Kelman 2018).

As with the disasters they produce (Chapter 1), disaster risks are socially constructed primarily through pre-existing vulnerabilities. However, this does not disregard that there are risks in the physical world (Rosa and Clarke 2012).

Vulnerabilities that create, cause, and make the disaster are present waiting to be uncovered prior to any hazard. And the vulnerabilities linger through the post-disaster recovery, long after the hazard has diminished. For example, the devastating effects of Hurricane Katrina ‘arose out of a combination of place-based vulnerability and ecosystem, built environment and social vulnerability’ (Tierney 2014).

Further exploration of disaster risk and vulnerability, and their implications for disaster learning, is provided in Chapter 5.