Sustainable livelihoods and people’ s vulnerability in the face of coastal hazards JC Gaillard & Emmanuel A. Maceda & Elodie Stasiak & Iwan Le Berre & Maria Victoria O. Espaldon Received: 6 October 2008 / Revised: 1 May 2009 / Accepted: 27 May 2009 / Published online: 16 June 2009 # Springer Science + Business Media B.V. 2009 Abstract The present study investigates into the link between people’ s vulnerability in the face of coastal hazards and sustainable livelihoods. It focuses on the town of Borongan in the Philippines and draws on questionnaire- based surveys and focus group discussions. This research shows that local fishermen are often compelled to go out fishing despite pending typhoon or storm surge to sustain the daily needs of their family. Its also demonstrates that the capacity of these people to protect themselves from the threat is constrained by poor and fragile livelihoods. In the event of a crisis, the study argues that people resort to a range of adjustments on their daily life which is rooted in the strength and diversity of their livelihoods. To reduce people’ s vulnerability and enhance capacities to face coastal hazards, the study fosters Community-Based Disaster Risk Reduction with special emphasis to sustainable livelihoods. Keywords Coastal hazards . Vulnerability . Capacity . Sustainable livelihoods . Philippines Introduction Natural hazards and their impact on human societies are often considered out of the regular social fabric. Scientists, institutions, governments and media often mention ‘extra- ordinary’ and ‘un-certain’ phenomena, ‘un-expected’ dis- asters, ‘un-scheduled’ and ‘un-anticipated’ damage that affect regions which are ‘under-developed’, ‘over-populat- ed’, ‘un-informed’, ‘un-prepared’, ‘un-planned’. In conse- quence, measures planned to prevent disaster are geared toward the extreme dimension of natural phenomena and include specific, technocratic, command-and-control mea- sures such as engineering structures, land-use planning and hazard awareness campaign. This is the dominant approach of disasters or “paradigm of the extreme” (Hewitt 1983; Gaillard 2007). A sharp increase in the number of disasters worldwide between the first and second half of the 20th century (Centre for Research on Epidemiology of Disasters 2008; Corporación OSSO and La Red de Estudios Sociales en Prevención de Desastres en América Latina 2008) shows that this strategy failed in its objective to reduce the occurrence of disasters. The dominant approach largely failed because it does not consider the real causes of disasters which lie in the ‘normal’, everyday functioning of the society. Victims of disasters are indeed disproportionately drawn from the segments of the society which are marginalized in daily life (Wisner 1993; Wisner et al. 2004; Gaillard 2007). Disaster J Coast Conserv (2009) 13:119–129 DOI 10.1007/s11852-009-0054-y J. Gaillard (*) UMR 5194 Pacte – CNRS, Université de Grenoble, Grenoble, France e-mail: jean-christophe.gaillard@ujf-grenoble.fr J. Gaillard : E. A. Maceda Department of Geography, University of the Philippines Diliman, Quezon City, Philippines E. Stasiak Faculté des Géosciences et de l’Environnement, Université de Lausanne, Lausanne, Switzerland I. Le Berre Laboratoire Geomer, UMR 6554 LETG – CNRS, Brest, France M. V. O. Espaldon School of Environmental Science and Management, University of the Philippines Los Baños, Los Baños, Philippines JC Gaillard (*) JC Gaillard & E. A. Maceda