Abstract
Interest in disaster management is arising as damage caused by disasters increases worldwide. Many countries are severely affected by emerging risks such as COVID-19 and the enlargement of complex disasters. Complexity theory has been applied to explain how events occur through numerous interactions among elements that often occur in a straightforward but complex manner. The power law distribution is considered one of the significant components of the complexity theory. In this study, the power law distribution has been applied to identify the relationship between the frequency and magnitude of disasters using the official government data between 1957 and 2020 in Korea. Through the estimation of power law coefficients, the level of disaster preparedness of Korea was judged by comparing them with other continents. Moreover, we provide a detailed explanation of the algorithm used for deriving the coefficients of power law distribution. Since extreme catastrophic events are in the long tail of the power law distribution, efforts should be made to have a response system for an event with a very low probability of occurrence but a huge impact.
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Sohn, HG., Kim, Yk., Kwon, Y. (2023). Studying Disasters Through Complexity Theory. In: Singh, A. (eds) International Handbook of Disaster Research. Springer, Singapore. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-19-8388-7_150
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-19-8388-7_150
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