Purpose: The purpose of this paper is to determine whether it is useful to tease apart the intimately related propositions of social production and social construction to guide thinking in the multidisciplinary study of disasters.Design/methodology/approach: The authors address our question by reviewing literature on disasters in the social sciences to disambiguate the concepts of social production and social construction.Findings: The authors have found that entertaining the distinction between social production and social construct can inform both thinking and action on disasters by facilitating critical exercises in reframing that facilitate dialog across difference. The authors present a series of arguments on the social production and construction of disaster and advocate putting these constructs in dialog with vulnerability frameworks of the social production of disasters.Originality/value: This commentary contributes to disambiguating important theoretical and practical concepts in disaster studies. The reframing approach can inform both research and more inclusive disaster management and risk reduction efforts.

Rapid socioeconomic development in earthquake-prone areas can cause rapid changes in seismic loss risks. These changes make it difficult to ensure that risk reduction strategies are realistic, practical and effective over time. To overcome this difficulty, ongoing changes in risk should be captured timely, definitively, and accurately and then specific and well-timed adjustments of the relevant strategies should be made. However, methods for rapidly characterizing such seismic disaster risks over a large area have not been sufficiently developed. By focusing on building loss risks, this paper presents the development of an integrated method that combines remote sensing data and local knowledge to resolve this problem. This method includes two key interdependent steps. (1) To extract the heights and footprint areas of a large number of buildings accurately and quickly from single high-resolution optical remote sensing images; (2) To estimate the floor areas, identify structural types, develop damage probability matrixes, and determine economic parameters for calculating monetary losses due to seismic damage to the buildings by reviewing building-relevant local knowledge based on these two parameters (i.e., the building heights and footprint areas). This method is demonstrated in the Tangshan area of China. Based on the integrated method, the total floor area of the residential and public office buildings in central Tangshan in 2009 was 3.99% lower than the corresponding area number obtained by a conventional earthquake loss estimation project. Our field-based verification indicated that the mean relative error of the method for estimating the floor areas of the assessed buildings was 2.99%. A simulation of the impacts of the 1976 Ms 7.8 Tangshan earthquake using this method indicated that the total damaged floor area of the residential and public office buildings and the associated direct monetary loses in the study area could have been 8.00 and 28.73 times greater, respectively, than in 1976 if this earthquake had recurred in 2009, which is a strong warning to the local people regarding the increasing challenges they may face.

Earthquakes happen suddenly and are immensely destructive. They not only destroy entire societal production and infrastructure systems but also seriously interfere with daily life and reduce opportunities to earn income in earthquake-affected areas. In this paper, using the Ning’er Ms 6.4 earthquake in 2007 as an example, we analyzed the livelihood vulnerability of rural households in Ning’er County, Yunnan, based on data from questionnaires and on-site interviews. The results showed that on the whole, local rural household livelihoods are relatively vulnerable in the earthquake-affected area of Ning’er. The main reason for the high level of vulnerability of rural households is the lack of single or multiple incomes. Due to the shortage of household income, the capacity of rural households to manage the aftermath of an earthquake is low. Improving the income allocation and transformation level and expanding methods of earning income is an effective way for rural households to decrease livelihood vulnerability in earthquake-prone areas. Some suggestions are given for local rural households to enhance their livelihood income levels in the event of earthquakes.