What Is Mitigation And Types Of Mitigation

Mitigation refers to the pre-disaster planning over a long term which will involve sustained spending on structural as well as non-structural efforts aimed at eliminating or reducing the future risks. Mitigation is said to be the corner stone of every emergency management. It is a clear example of what thinking in advance can pay in the long run. In actual practice, mitigation plans and activities can be either medium or long term.

The objective of mitigation

Mitigation aims at reducing the loss of life and property by reducing the impact of disasters. For mitigation to be effective, it is important to act proactively – well in advance before the next disaster can strike us – so that the human and financial consequences can be reduced later. It is very important to go by the fact that disasters are unpredictable and can happen at any time and at any place. If we do not stay prepared for mitigation, the consequences can be serious and fatal. Effective mitigation requires that we fully understand the local risks, work with the hard choices and invest for the long-term well-being of the community. Overlooking the right kind of mitigation actions will mean jeopardizing our safety, financial security and self-reliance.

Risk Acceptance

Risk acceptance is considered a mitigation strategy though it does not reduce the effects of the risk. This is the most common option when the other mitigation methods are not feasible or if the cost of other mitigation efforts can outweigh the cost of the risk itself. The community that does not have a high possibility of risk occurrence or the one that does not wish to spend much on avoiding risks will go by the risk acceptance strategy.

Risk Avoidance

Considered the opposite of risk acceptance, risk avoidance is the action that can avoid any exposure to the risk, whatever it might be. We can say risk avoidance is generally the most expensive among the different risk mitigation options in front of us.

Risk Limitation

As evident in general life, we find risk limitation to be the most common type of mitigation approach among the different risk management strategies. Risk limitation aims at limiting a community’s exposure to the risk factor by taking some action in advance. In this strategy, we find a combination of risk acceptance as well as risk avoidance to some extent. When you take efforts in the line of risk limitation, you aim at reducing the impact and consequences of the risk by acting proactively and by staying prepared to combat the risk in the right way.

Risk Transference

Risk transference refers to transferring the risk to the third party that willingly comes forward to accept such transference. Outsourcing is one of the most common examples of risk transference in which combating the given risk is entrusted to a third party. This can be beneficial in case the community is not well equipped to face or fight with the risk. This is especially useful when a community wants to focus on other important activities than mitigation, entrusting the responsibility to a competent agency.