1. Introduction
The concept of disaster has a wide range of interpretation with many different causes and consequences [
1]. Generally speaking, disaster is a phenomenon that visits devastating effects on people, the economy, community, and infrastructure [
2,
3]. The United Nations Office for Disaster Risk Reduction (UNDRR) indicated that disasters seriously disrupt a community or a society’s operation at any scale [
4]. Disasters have caused significant loss to lives and infrastructure [
5] and substantially contribute to increased poverty challenges [
6]. The geographical location, land composition, and other environmental factors (rivers, monsoon climate) make Sierra Leone highly vulnerable to disasters [
6]. The most common disasters in Sierra Leone include floods, landslides, and droughts [
7]. Sierra Leone experienced one of the worst disasters in 2017 when it was hit by a massive landslide and floods in Freetown, causing colossal destruction that led to food insecurity, economic hardship, and disaster-related health hazards [
7]. The country promptly responded to the crisis as effective crisis-response management made the government less dependent on humanitarian aid [
7]. Economic hardship is a driving factor [
8] that forces the less-privileged to dwell in high-risk areas, making them vulnerable to disasters [
9]. These consequences can be mitigated through DRR via disaster policy implementation (DPI). On one hand, the DRR is an efficient method that identifies, assesses, and reduces disaster risk and curtails a community’s vulnerability [
10,
11,
12,
13]. On the other hand, it is a proactive measure taken to prevent or lessen the adversative effects of disaster risks, thereby enabling sustainable development (SD) action [
14,
15,
16].
Sustainable development is defined as those needs that meet the present without hampering future generations’ capability to meet their own needs [
17]. The goals are to end poverty, protect our planet, and ensure that humans enjoy peace and prosperity. SD and DRR are thus closely linked. A single devastating natural disaster can cause catastrophes that would hinder sustainable development initiatives [
17,
18]. For instance, Sierra Leone was among the fastest-growing economies globally in 2012 before the deadly Ebola struck in 2014 [
19,
20,
21,
22], which greatly affected sustainable development. Sierra Leone’s Agenda for Prosperity lists disaster risk and emergencies as a cross-cutting risk that undermines sustainable development [
23]. The Government of Sierra Leone created a Disaster Management Department (DMD) and the Office of National Security (ONS) in 2006, charged with the responsibility of managing disasters nationally [
6]. Unfortunately, the draft Disaster Management Policy of 2006 is yet to be enacted by the Parliament of Sierra Leone. The 2006 draft Disaster Policy stated the aims, objectives, strategies, roles, and responsibilities of disaster institutions and implementing agencies and highlights the need for an all-inclusive method and improvement on the integration of disaster risk management (DRM) into sustainable development programs and policies [
6,
24]. DRM is a policy formation that highlights the specific guidelines for reducing disaster risks and other related approaches to attain these objectives [
4]. Sierra Leone has committed itself to review the National DRM Policy through a participatory process with a clear definition of strategic activities through the development of the National DRM Strategy and Action Plan [
6]. The strategy should provide a straightforward approach and set national priorities for DRR [
6,
24]. The process should encourage complementarities, remove duplication, and ensure the mainstreaming of DRR into developmental planning [
6]. A national DRM policy serves as a requisite institutional capacity tool for disaster reduction at all levels and increases the use of knowledge, education, training, innovation, and information sharing to build safe and resilient societies [
6,
24]. Therefore, the ONS implemented several activities to improve the country’s institutional capacity on DRM comprehensively [
6]. It seeks to recruit a DRM policy consultant to review and update the draft National Disaster Risk Management Policy [
24].
Following the trend of DRR, the Third UN World Conference on DRR held in Japan (2015) established the Sendai Framework for Disaster Risk Reduction (SFDRR) for 2015–2030 [
25]: implement a precise, focused, forward-looking and action-oriented post-2015 framework for DRR; complement the Hyogo Framework for Action (HFA) implementation 2005–2015 [
8]. Therefore, it has provided an exceptional prospect for promoting strategic and systematic methods to mitigate vulnerabilities and risks [
25]. Additionally, the SFDRR indicated that countries reiterated their obligation to address DRR and build disasters resilience with a transformed firmness within the perspective of SD and poverty annihilation.
The unplanned urbanization and climate change have triggered impaired disaster risks [
23] in Freetown. Highlands surround the capital coast with limited land for the city to expand. People and infrastructure are highly exposed to landslides, floods, and sea-level rise [
6,
23]. Other factors include poor infrastructure, deforestation, and a poor drainage system [
26]. The country is much overwhelmed by many natural and human-made disasters [
6]. This is due to the civil conflict that collapsed the security infrastructure and led to massive environmental issues and infrastructural resources mismanagement [
1].
Furthermore, the recurrent disasters such as the 2014-2016 Ebola crisis [
27,
28,
29], the 2015 flood [
27,
28], and the 2017 landslide and floods [
26,
29,
30] undoubtedly have created economic hardship among the bulk of the country’s population, destroying human lives, properties, and livelihood [
31,
32]. Therefore, DRR is predominantly necessary for SD goals since it offers a safety net for underdeveloped countries’ hard-earned development advantages [
33,
34]. It is a great challenge to manage Sierra Leone’s disasters due to the lack of funds and material resources, and a comprehensive disaster policy implementation [
24].
However, Sierra Leone has raised a robust DRP strategy through community participation and implementing disaster policy framework at community levels as shown on the ONS official website (
https://ons.gov.sl) [accessed on 13 November 2020]. Therefore, the paper contributes to the disaster debate by exploring DRR and SD in the Sierra Leone context. To further enrich the discussion around disaster policy orientation, the role of DPI is also accounted for in the proposed model which is lacking in the extant literature.
2. Literature Review
Disasters significantly hinder sustainable development [
35]. The annual floods that hit the capital, Freetown, result from the poor drainage system, poor infrastructural development, erecting temporary structures in hazardous and disaster-prone environments or water routes [
7,
23]. Some of the contributing factors of the 2017 catastrophe [
36] include massive urbanization, unplanned urbanization–illegal housing development, and deforestation–exposing the soil to erosion and making it unable to absorb rain during high rainfall and increasing the risk of disaster [
29,
30]. The most problematic issue in responding to natural disasters is that there is no "silver bullet" solution [
36]. Therefore, effective DRM policies will help mitigate disaster risks and build a sustainable community [
24]. However, disasters are becoming a frequent norm, meaning any single dollar spent on DRM will potentially save the
$3 required for post-disaster recovery [
36].
Sierra Leone has experienced multiple disasters in the last decade [
37]. Some of the disasters include cholera, measles, and the deadly regional Ebola epidemic, which lasted for two years and infected more than 8000 people nationwide with a fatality of 3500 [
37]. According to Sumati Rajput and Rui Xu (2020), the massive landslide and floods in 2017 approximately affected 6000 people and inflicted economic losses to the tune of 31.65 million US dollars, equivalent to 0.8% of the 2016 gross domestic product (GDP) [
5,
7]. Similarly, multiple floods hit six districts in Sierra Leone and damaged homes, temporarily displaced thousands, and caused significant long-term implications for food security in 2019 [
37].
Disasters affected approximately 98.6 million globally, with more than 340 disasters in 2015, costing 66.5 billion US dollars damages to the global economy [
38]. In 2019, 395 natural disasters with 11,755 fatalities affected approximately 95 million people, costing 130 billion US dollars in damages [
38]. Research has recently shown that disaster risk impacts will continue to rise exponentially [
39] and indicates that policymakers should focus more on building societal resilience for community participation and cohesive and effective disaster policy implementation [
39]. The UNDRR Global Assessment Report (GAR) indicates that severe disparities exist between developed and underdeveloped countries [
40]. Underdeveloped countries continue to suffer the highest relative disaster costs in damages [
6,
7]. The report further suggested that the loss of lives and properties on the GDP inclines higher in countries with the inadequate infrastructural capacity to prepare promptly, fund, and respond to disasters [
6]. An effective DPI process is required to comprehensively analyze the direct loss and damage in understanding the impact of DRR holistically [
6]. Previous GAR reports indicate further importance of the percentage of income or assets lost in the loss analysis. To achieve these demands, all parties considered specified, in the post-2015 agreements, goals and targets and design metrics for those dimensions of disaster impact to make communities less vulnerable [
6]. Notably, this should be done by improving community participation at the household level [
36]. A prompt effort is required to understand how shocks affect people’s well-being in general. The necessary support can then be given to nations to strategize solutions and influence human behavior, to preventing the creation and propagation of risk, and as well as to recover from disasters [
41].
If adequately designed and implemented, the DRM will successively form the support for national disaster awareness and adaptation policies to cope with the impacts of risk and maximize the available resources to respond and adapt to future challenges [
4]. National and local government authorities perform a central role of networks and interconnectivity established through an increasingly globalized economy [
42] and their ability to communicate information to local citizens [
43]. However, Schipper and Pelling [
44] suggested that "DRR is largely a task for local actors, although with support from national and international organizations." This is because DRR policies and approaches consider a comprehensive view of risks and hazards, mostly socio-economic and political in origin since “wider social, political, environmental and economic environments in which a hazard is situated” [
45]. This suggests that institutional DPI support at national and international levels can enable local DRM adoption, but only if it is consistent at the local level through the supportive policies and approaches [
46]. To achieve robust disaster risk resilience, Kappes et al. [
47] proposed exploring the frameworks applied in risk management with collaborations between science and practice about knowledge transfer and applicability. Effective frameworks use applicable instruments to interconnect and transfer knowledge related to risk to numerous community leaders engaged in disaster decision-making [
48].
There is an increasing consciousness among users, organizers, and experts that risk reporting should be improved, as “better risk reporting is fundamental to healthier governance” [
49]. However, how best to balance what the community participants want to see in a risk report with what the organizations are willing to divulge remains unanswered [
49]. In particular, organizations are unwilling to reveal anything that might impend a competitive advantage or discuss possible risks in detail if these alarms community participants. This report is typically a boilerplate-broad-risk report serving no nation’s interest. Nevertheless, the risk assessment [
50] should become an integral component of DRR management. DRM can be a powerful instrument to raise DRP, DA, CP, and DPI to improve a holistic approach to sustainable development [
6]. Additionally, inadequate disaster policy implementation and cooperation among institutions, organizations, government departments, and the public are critical factors hampering DRR policy implementation in Sierra Leone [
45].
Thus, based on the extant literature, we suggest that DRRs are positively related to DPI, which, in turn, acts as a mediating role in the relationship between DRRs and SD. The conceptual model of the study is depicted in
Figure 1.
2.1. Hypothesis Development
2.1.1. Disaster Risk Perception, Policy Implementation, and Sustainable Development
Risk perception is a predecessor of mitigation behavior [
51,
52]. Mitigation behavior is practicing the limitation of adverse impacts of hazards and related disasters. Murphy et al. [
53] in 2005 viewed disaster risk perception as a process that links individual judgments of the degree of risk with action. Disaster-related risks have an effect on millions of people globally [
54,
55]. Landslides and flooding have posed a great danger to humanity and subsequently affect sustainable development [
54,
56]. Some hazards were not part of the HFA [
57] and are not familiar. Nevertheless, they were included in SFDRR [
25], including biological, nuclear/radiological, chemical/industrial, NATECH (natural hazards triggering technological disasters), and environmental hazards. Understanding how these hazards relate to exposure and vulnerability is crucial [
58]. Disaster risk is the possible loss of life, injury, or damage done to infrastructure that will affect a system, or a community in a given time, which is probabilistically a function of hazard, vulnerability, exposure, and capability [
59,
60]. Disaster risk also depends on the type of community, economic status, policies, and politics and does not only depend on frequency, intensity, and duration of hazards [
61]. A full understanding of the physical, cultural, societal, environmental, financial, and institutional dimensions of vulnerability to the most prevailing disasters in Sierra Leone (flood, mudslide, landslide, fire, road accidents, drought, epidemic diseases, and industrial accidents) must be carefully assessed [
62]. The socio-economic disparities affect the marginalized communities, women, children, older adults, healthcare complications, and disabilities being the most vulnerable people to natural disasters [
63,
64].
Nevertheless, the researchers are not oblivious to the fact that other barriers would impede the relationship between DRP and SD. Still, the focus is to provoke future direction that merits discussion. This means stringent adaptation policies should be initiated into DRR via DPI. Policy-makers and CSOs should continuously raise disaster awareness programs to educate people on how to adapt and prepare for disasters. Therefore, the study proposed the following hypotheses.
Hypothesis 1 (H1). Disaster risk perception positively influences sustainable development.
Hypothesis 2 (H2). Policy implementation mediates the relationship between disaster risk perception and sustainable development.
2.1.2. Disaster Adaptation, Policy Implementation, and Sustainable Development
Adaptation is humans’ ability to adjust to pressure [
65]. Adaptations also refer to the changes in the disaster risk guidelines and governance, changes in the organizations’ operation, and promotion of self-mobilization by civil society and private corporations [
66]. Adapting to environmental changeability has been a focus since the early 1900s [
67]. Humans need to learn to adjust to the social-ecological factors and their effects. Adaptation is a vital component in sustainability and disaster risk reduction fields [
68,
69,
70].
Generally, adaptation is a process where an individual improves his/her inherent genetic or behavioral characteristics to better adjust to changes through social learning [
71]. Adaptation can also curb harm, exploit potential benefits, minimize the adverse impacts, and maximize possible options to respond to disaster risk. The concept of adaptation means that humans should learn to adapt to natural disasters instead of controlling nature [
72]. Therefore, the research proposes the following hypotheses.
Hypothesis 3 (H3). Disaster adaptation positively influences sustainable development
Hypothesis 4 (H4). Policy implementation mediates the relationship between disaster adaptation and sustainable development.
2.1.3. Community Participation (CP), Policy Implementation, and Sustainable Development
Some literature has indicated that most past successful DRR initiatives resulted from community participation when designing appropriate DPI risks [
73,
74,
75]. Community participation is fundamental for DPI and DRR [
76]. Disaster-prone societies better know the socio-environmental limitations, clearly describing the vulnerabilities and constraints determining the DRR policy’s success. These communities have different interests, and therefore, their participation is needed to reach a compromise and achieve satisfaction [
47]. This is because community-based disaster training and maneuvers involving community participants build local capacities by raising awareness and resilience among the disaster-prone communities. To achieve this goal, communication and collaboration at community levels have proven fundamental to natural disaster preparation, response mechanism, and recovery phase [
73,
74,
75]. People with better infrastructure and livelihood perceived themselves as more resilient, even if the available monetary resources are small [
77]. Additionally, community participation guarantees transparency and disclosure of relevant information sharing, essential for DPI, and sustainable resource utilization equitably. Today, the top-down method practiced in several developing nations has failed to embrace developmental planning and vulnerability detection. On the other hand, community participation builds capacity and trust among the community’s people and lessens partisan interference through different groups. Community participation can detect a vulnerability, also in trade-offs to achieve SD [
78].
Moreover, community participation offers an integral instrument for disaster adaptation and control since the DRR is a dynamic process that adapts to innovations. Communities have used several application methods to mitigate disasters with local community participation [
78]. Community participation builds partnerships with a standard plan. Therefore, it depends on hands-on instruments among key participants by identifying influential leaderships who understand the shared interests, establishing trust, and achieving commitment [
79].
Therefore, we argue that community participation is positively related to sustainable development and DPI mediates the relationship between them:
Hypothesis 5 (H5). Community participation positively influences sustainable development.
Hypothesis 6 (H6). Policy implementation mediates the relationship between community participation and sustainable development.
2.1.4. Disaster Policy Implementation and Sustainable Development
DPI is crucial for DRR in Sierra Leone [
80]. This requires a harmonious action by disaster agencies to implement effective national and global disaster policy. The disaster policy frameworks of recent times include the SFDRR [
25,
59,
81], Paris Agreement on climate change [
82], Agenda 2030 for Sustainable Development [
83], the ACP-EU NDRR program [
84], Sierra Leone Disaster Management Policy [
1], and the EU Adaptation Strategy [
85], which have all highlighted the importance of adaptation and DRR and the co-benefits that may arise from the aligned DPI actions [
86,
87,
88,
89]. Legal and established guidelines certainly create an enabling environment for alliances between relevant policies and policy documentations as the first step of integrating sustainable DRR policy [
90]. However, the implementation of such processes in Sierra Leone mostly may depend on coordination among the various actors involved [
91,
92]. This process includes, among others, communication and teamwork among several institutions [
91,
92]. To achieve these, the DPI must underscore the relevance of promoting national disaster policies to strengthen the public education system by creating DRR awareness, sharing disaster risk information and knowledge through community-based organizations (CBOs) engagement, social networking sites, and community mobilization, targeting specific community’s needs. [
86]. Several efforts have supported DPI integration with DRR policies and agreements [
93,
94,
95,
96,
97,
98,
99,
100,
101]. The 2014 Ebola crisis established a set of policy recommendations for disaster-related threats into DPI planning for sustainable development [
86].
DPI is a system that enables increased political obligation to DRM, boosts local and national agencies to take the lead, and be supported by the national government and NGOs [
102]. It also raises public awareness and indicates the funding sources [
84], and reduces the bureaucracies to access disaster funds for effective disaster coordination and collaboration among key stakeholders. Thus, it can be hypothesized:
Hypothesis 7 (H7). Disaster policy implementation positively influences sustainable development.