**5. Integrating disaster risk into community projects through social impact assessment**

Sustainable development and disaster reduction are essential preconditions for each other. Natural disaster risk is a potential factor in many development projects. Environmental hazards can affect a project area, with socio-economic consequences for the project's target populations. Development projects can increase or reduce the risk of natural disaster, through their impact on social resilience and the natural environment.

Social impacts can be characterized and defined in many ways. The following definition is widely understood and used:

"By social impacts we mean the consequences to human populations of any public or private actions that alter the ways in which people live, work, play, relate to one another, organize to meet their needs and generally cope as members of society. The term also includes cultural impacts involving changes to the norms, values, and beliefs that guide and rationalize their cognition of themselves and their society."(Inter-organizational Committee on Principles and Guidelines for Social Impact Assessment, 2003).

SIA originated as a socio-economic component of environmental impact assessment (EIA), although it has since expanded and developed considerably, in developed and developing countries. SIAs can be carried out at different stages in project and policy development, from initial planning to implementation and post-implementation evaluation. In project-level assessment, typical applications include considering the likely impacts of new industrial activities, construction, land use or resource management practices. SIA often forms part of a broader social analysis or assessment, but has a distinct and more specific purpose.

As a conceptual model, SIA is equipped to take hazard and related disaster risk into account, whether these are external factors affecting a project or conditions created or magnified by the project itself. In general, SIA can be understood as a framework for evaluation of all impacts on humans and on all the ways in which people and communities interact with their sociocultural, economic and environmental surroundings.

By providing an understanding of the community and its social processes, SIA makes it possible to:

**•** identify the direct and indirect social consequences of risks (i.e., the social impacts which could arise from a hazard event); and

**•** develop appropriate and effective mitigation mechanisms to hazards which harness community resources and recognize community reactions to events.

SIA theory accepts that social, economic and biophysical impacts are interconnected and that change in any one of these domains will lead to changes in the others. Seen in this way, SIA has clear linkages to EIA and other forms of ex-ante impact assessment, as well as with vulnerability and sustainable livelihoods analysis. Guidance on SIA makes it clear that good practice in project design and implementation is risk-averse.

However, while hazards and risk are important features of the SIA process, SIA is not specifically a risk assessment but a means of understanding and measuring human responses to situations that may be risky or threatening.

Therefore, SIA is not commonly used *by itself* as a method of analysing hazard risks generated by a project or external to it. It is more common for a formal risk analysis or a health impact assessment (see Box 2) to be undertaken, either to complement the SIA or within a broader EIA of which the SIA is part.
