Australian Curriculum links
Learning areas
Geography
Year 7
The causes, impacts and responses to an atmospheric or hydrological hazard (ACHGK042)
Year 8
The causes, impacts and responses to a geomorphological hazard (ACHGK053)
General capabilities
- Creative thinking
- ICT
- Intercultural understanding
- Literacy
- Numeracy
Cross–curriculum priorities
- Asia and Australia's engagement with Asia
- Sustainability
Students develop understanding of natural hazards, their characteristics and how their impact on people and the environment can turn them into disasters.
List some natural hazards that you can think of.
Explore the following websites and use the information to add to your list of natural hazards:
Discuss in groups, one of the hazards and create a hazard profile using the following questions:
- Where does this kind of hazard occur?
- What causes the hazard?
- How much warning is there?
- What sort of damage does it do to people and the environment?
- How are different people (eg school child, subsistence farmer, day labourer, transport worker, large business operator) affected? Who would be most affected?
- Why might people live in an area affected by this type of hazard?
- How could people prepare for this type of disaster?
Share the hazard profiles with others in your class and discuss how the hazards can be categorised (eg cause, length of warning, impact, cost of recovery).
Read the Global issues expanded and suggest times and places the hazards profiled could become a disaster.
Students investigate how individuals, communities and countries respond to and recover from natural disasters.
Discuss the hazard profiles and explore reasons why different hazards require different responses.
Read, in small groups, the information about these disasters:
Write notes describing the impact of each disaster on human activity. The following questions can be used to assist this process:
- What happened during the disaster?
- How many people were affected?
- How was property affected?
- How was the environment affected?
- Who responded and how?
- What obstacles to the response might have been encountered?
Refer to the categories created in Activity 1 and decide which one the floods and tsunami fit into.
Outline the impact they have on human activities.
List the responses and who was involved.
Discuss as a class the effects that both disasters have in common.
Write a paragraph explaining the difference between a hazard and a disaster.
Read the section, Emergency response in the Disasters global issue expanded.
List the emergency responses that the hazard your group investigated in Activity 1 would need.
Analyse the statistics about disaster frequency and impact for the countries in the disaster investigated from CRED's The International Disaster Database.
Describe the similarities and differences between the countries and suggest reasons for these.
Students examine activities to minimise the impacts of future natural hazards in Indonesia and Laos and apply this learning to situations in Australia and Japan.
Use the information you have read so far to make a list of organisations that assist during the emergency and recovery process. Next to each name, write down some of their activities.
Discuss how individuals, such as students, can assist these organisations.
Read/view these two case studies about disaster preparedness.
Answer the following questions about each of the stories:
- Which hazard is the focus of the preparation? Where and with what frequency does this disaster occur in the focus country?
- What are some of the activities undertaken to reduce the impact of disasters?
- How do these activities build people's resilience?
- Why do you think Australia is helping people in this community to prepare for disasters?
Compare and contrast the two projects using this information. These steps will assist you with the structure of your answer:
- create a topic sentence
- look for key ideas with supporting information
- develop a concluding sentence that summarises the information.
Complete the following table comparing the responses to different disasters.
| Disaster | Response |
|---|
| Earthquake | |
| Tsunami | |
| Floods | |
| Drought | |
| Famine | |
| Typhoon | |
| Pandemic (disease) | |
Identify responses that are common to all the disasters and work as a group to suggest how communities, governments and organisations can pre-prepare for disasters and respond more efficiently when disasters occur.
