Introduction

The Researcher is frequently cited as among the top countries most at risk to disasters. While
disasters can arise from man-made sources, the most inevitable ones come from natural
phenomena. Even without scientific scrutiny, every Filipino is familiar with the impacts of
typhoons, earthquakes, volcanic eruptions, and fires to everyday life and to national
development. This makes learning about disaster preparedness aligned with everyone’s interests.
This teaching guide for the Disaster Readiness and Risk Reduction (DRRR) subject of the
Philippines’ K-12 Curriculum provides a lesson-by-lesson framework for educators to help
learners attain the target competencies and outcomes. The challenge with teaching a subject like
DRRR is its multi-disciplinary nature, bringing together biological, geophysical, socio-cultural,
political, and economic factors. This in itself is an opportunity to make these various subject
matters relevant to the lives of the people even if studying disasters leans toward the sciences.
With the use of these teaching guides, the teacher will be able to handle a diverse set of materials
that will enrich their existing knowledge on the natural and social sciences. They will also be
able to engage learners in a number of hands-on activities that make use of mixed-media to
maximize existing resources. And overall, lessons tackled in these guides encourage a two-way
interaction between the teachers and students that will ultimately result to effective learning.
Lessons of these teaching guides address the content standards identified by the Department of
Education (DepEd). Some teaching guides may include multiple learning competencies as that
may be more efficiently achieved when tackled together. This guide approaches learning about
DRRR by first understanding the hazards that may then potentially lead to disasters, as a
common confusion arises from distinguishing the concepts of “hazard and “disaster”. Each
hazard type has its own precautionary measures and ideal responses to prevent disasters.
Towards the end of the subject, learners will focus on applications to the community and the
Philippine society. Users of these guides should note that sciences and policies related to DRRR
are ever evolving along with improvements and breakthroughs in data collection and technology;
so it is expected that reference materials also change through time. It would be important for
teachers of the subject to continually update any cited references in each guide to make sure that
the lessons will also result to cutting-edge teaching.

As a big part of understanding disasters involves projecting future possibilities, the success of
teaching the subject of Disaster Readiness and Risk Reduction may not be immediately
measurable and definitely not something anyone is looking forward to test. But while the country
is exposed to hazards that can alter the course of everyday life, bringing this subject to each
classroom gives the people the power to take control of their lives and of nation-building in
whatever the situation they may encounter in the future.
Related Review

The rapid appraisal methodology “is an approach for quickly developing a preliminary
understanding of a situation where specific research techniques are from a wide range of
options” (Beebe Citation1995, p. 43). This approach gives researchers the opportunity to note
trends in the literature, and allows consensus about good practice to be identified. A general
schema for how rapid appraisal should be performed is given by Arksey and O'Malley
(Citation2005, p. 22): Stage 1: identify the research question; Stage 2: identify relevant studies;
Stage 3: study selection; Stage 4: chart the data; then Stage 5: collate, summarize, and report the
results.

The specific implementation of each of these stages depends on the study in question. The
collection of potentially relevant literature is generally performed in large part by machine
searches (Perales et al. Citation2014). Initial study selection is generally performed manually,
most commonly by reading the abstracts, introductions, and conclusions of the papers that were
found by automated methods to be potentially relevant, followed by careful review of the
targeted publications.

For this literature review, ∼150 academic papers from 2012 to 20171 were identified from
Google Scholar. This selection was based on the search term “disaster (prepare*|responses |
recover*|govern*) OR (recovery AND disaster) OR (measuring)? resilience
(implementation)?”.2 This filter was designed to capture papers in the following topic areas: risk
reduction; disaster preparedness; disaster response; disaster recovery; economic recovery from
disaster; measuring resilience; disaster governance; and resilience implementation. Papers were
screened for relevance based on their titles, abstracts, and conclusions. If a paper was deemed
relevant, it was imported into the text processing software suite NVivo. We undertook a text
frequency analysis and found six groups of frequent lemmas3 in the literature.

Lemmas were chosen as the basis of search frequency because searching for words themselves
leads to less meaningful results, as function words like and and the tend to make up the largest
proportion of words used in a document. These lemmas were then used as search terms for the
body of documents. This allowed for the identification of the most relevant papers for each of the
key terms.
Discussion

The National Disaster Risk Reduction and Management Plan (NDRRMP) fulfills the
requirement of RA No. 10121 of 2010, which provides the legal basis for policies, plans and
programs to deal with disasters. The NDRRMP covers four thematic areas, namely, (1) Disaster
Prevention and Mitigation; (2) Disaster Preparedness; (3) Disaster Response; and (4) Disaster
Rehabilitation and Recovery, which correspond to the structure of the National Disaster Risk
Reduction and Management Council (NDRRMC). By law, the Office of Civil Defense
formulates and implements the NDRRMP and ensures that the physical framework, social,
economic and environmental plans of communities, cities, municipalities and provinces are
consistent with such plan.

The NDRRMP is consistent with the National Disaster Risk Reduction and Management
Framework (NDRRMF), which serves as “the principal guide to disaster risk reduction and
management (DRRM) efforts to the country….” The Framework envisions a country of “safer,
adaptive and disaster resilient Filipino communities toward sustainable development.” It conveys
a paradigm shift from reactive to proactive DRRM wherein men and women have increased their
awareness and understanding of DRRM, with the end in view of increasing people’s resilience
and decreasing their vulnerabilities.

National Disaster Risk Reduction and Management Plan 2011-2028. The NDRRMP sets down
the expected outcomes, outputs, key activities, indicators, lead agencies, implementing partners
and timelines under each of the four distinct yet mutually reinforcing thematic areas. The goals
of each thematic area lead to the attainment of the country’s overall DRRM vision, as graphically
shown below.
Conclusion

Resilience has undeniably become one of the big ideas of our time for dealing with uncertainty
(Ruszczyk 2019). Beyond its catchy and all-encompassing nature, the concept is now being used
as the basis for reflective decisions and concrete practices (Matyas and Pelling 2015),
particularly by local communities. As discussions on resilience in the context of disaster risk,
climate change, and sustainable development continue, its conceptualizations have yet to
converge into a widely accepted framework (Mochizuki et al. 2018). Concerns and debates
remain about its operationalization, effectiveness, and especially about the equity issues
associated with it. The great conceptual evolution that resilience has undergone also raises
questions. To what extent can a concept evolve, move away from its original meaning, without
becoming distorted? Is resilience really the result of the evolution of efforts and the paradigm
shift that disaster risk management has undergone in recent decades? Or has resilience reached
its limit and are we seeing the emergence of a new, integrative concept?

References
=Disaster Risk Reduction | UNESCO

=Full article: A review of themes in disaster resilience literature and international practice since 2012
(tandfonline.com)

=National Disaster Risk Reduction and Management Plan (NDRRMP) 2011‐2028 - Philippines |
=ReliefWebNational Disaster Risk Reduction and Management Plan (NDRRMP) 2011‐2028 - Philippines |
ReliefWeb