Draft 0.1, 29 September 2026. Visible to administrators only, for review before publication.

Module 1: Knowing your risks and assessing your community

Reading time about 30 minutes, workshop about 90 minutes. For Rotarians in clubs and districts, disaster and CED coordinators, and the local leaders they work with.

What you will be able to do

List the main hazards of your territory from official sources and local memory, and rank them with a probability and impact matrix.
Map where the impact would be worst: risk zones, critical infrastructure, vulnerable people, available resources.
Draw an economic picture of your territory: who lives from what, and what would stop after a disaster.
Plan a community needs assessment with Rotary's assessment tools, without deciding for the community.
Involve the community at every step, including after a disaster, when people are tired and grieving.

Why it matters

RAGCED's first disaster mandate is to prepare communities before a disaster. Preparation starts with knowledge: a club that does not know its risks prepares a generic plan, and a generic plan is a useless plan. RAGCED's second mandate, restarting the local economy after a disaster, depends on the same knowledge. Recovery is much faster when the club already knows which businesses employ people, which markets feed families, and which local partners can carry a project. This module builds that knowledge in calm times, so that it is ready when it is needed.

Residents study new flood-risk maps at a public open house

Hazards, vulnerability, capacities

Three words structure this module.

Hazard: the event that can strike. An earthquake, a flood, a cyclone, a drought, an epidemic, a major power cut.
Vulnerability: what makes people, places and livelihoods fragile in front of that hazard. A neighbourhood built in a flood zone, an isolated elderly person, a village whose only income is one crop.
Capacities: what the community already has to face it. Skills, organisations, buildings, savings, networks, solidarity between neighbours.

A disaster happens when a hazard meets vulnerability that capacities cannot absorb. The club cannot stop a cyclone. It can reduce vulnerability and strengthen capacities.

The Disaster Field Guide classifies disasters in six families (geophysical, meteorological and hydrological, climatological and environmental, technological, biological, complex), inspired by the international EM-DAT classification. One distinction matters most for preparation: how fast the hazard arrives.

Onset	Delay	What it changes
Sudden	Seconds to hours	Everything rests on what was prepared before
Slow	Days to months	Time to warn, protect stock, move assets
Complex	Variable	Conflict, drought and displacement combined

Step 1: know your risks

Official sources

Every country publishes risk information. Start with the national risk maps and the civil protection authority, then use international references:

GDACS (gdacs.org): global disaster alerts.
EM-DAT (emdat.be): historical disaster database.
UNDRR PreventionWeb (preventionweb.net): country risk profiles.
USGS (earthquake.usgs.gov): seismic data.

Local memory

Official databases do not capture everything. Ask club elders, local elected officials, firefighters, insurers and the local press: which events marked the territory in living memory? Which neighbourhood floods every few years? Which road is cut first?

Climate trends

Climate change moves the risk profile. Events that were exceptional become recurrent, and new risks appear. At each yearly review, ask one question for every risk: has it increased since last year? If yes, raise its probability score. ESRAG, the Rotary action group on environmental sustainability, can help clubs integrate the climate dimension.

The probability and impact matrix

Not every risk deserves the same effort. Score each identified risk from 1 to 5 for probability (from very low to near certain) and from 1 to 5 for impact (from minor to catastrophic, with multi-year recovery). Multiply the two scores.

Score	Level	Preparation
1 to 4	Low	Monitoring, generic plan
5 to 9	Moderate	Basic preparation, checklist
10 to 15	High	Specific plan, yearly drill
16 to 25	Critical	Detailed plan, partners, budget

The two or three risks scoring 10 or more are your priority risks. For each, note the last occurrence, the most exposed zones and the population at risk.

Step 2: map your territory

A risk does not strike a territory evenly. A flood takes the low-lying areas, a cyclone the exposed coast. The map shows where to act. No sophisticated software is needed: a municipal map printed in A3 with one coloured layer per theme, or a free collaborative map such as Google My Maps or OpenStreetMap, is enough.

Map four layers:

Risk zones: flood areas, exposed coastline, unstable slopes, industrial sites, forest edges, known faults.
Critical infrastructure: hospital, drinking water plant, power substation, bridges and main roads, schools and gyms that can shelter people, town hall, fuel stations.
Vulnerable people: isolated elderly people, people with disabilities, young children, homeless people, visitors, people who do not speak the local language, households in precarious housing.
Available resources: warehouses, supermarkets and wholesalers, open land, construction companies, pharmacies, and the skills and equipment of club members.

The map must exist, be updated every year, and be accessible offline to the club president and the disaster coordinator.

Step 3: diagnose the local economy

This is where RAGCED's approach adds something to classic disaster preparedness. The question is not only "who will be hurt?" but also "who lives from what, and what would stop?"

The Canadian Community Toolkit for Economic Recovery and Resiliency (2019) recommends an inventory of the local economy built in calm times: demography, key industries, key employers and where they are, the workforce, buildings and infrastructure of economic importance, development projects and the local policy framework. It recommends collecting, storing, protecting and updating these data every year. It also reminds us that economies do not follow administrative boundaries: the diagnosis must look at where workers live, where goods come from and where they are sold.

The CED guide organises the economic diagnosis in five layers:

Layer	Key questions
Populations	Who is poor, young, jobless, displaced?
Activities	Which sectors feed families?
Infrastructure	Markets, roads, power, credit points
Institutions	Lenders, cooperatives, training, chambers
Networks	NGOs, associations, clubs, diaspora

Then ask the disaster question, activity by activity. A simple grid works well in a club meeting:

What does this activity depend on? Power, a road, a bridge, one supplier, one buyer, a harvest season, tourists.
Which priority risk would stop it? A flood in the market district, a drought, a cut bridge.
Who would lose their income? Workers, suppliers, the families behind them.
What would help it restart? Stock, credit, repairs, a temporary market, a cooperative.

Look at chronic stresses as well as shocks. The same toolkit distinguishes sudden shocks such as earthquakes, fires or floods from stresses that weaken a community every day, such as high unemployment or chronic shortages of water and food. A community already weakened by stresses recovers more slowly from a shock.

Step 4: the community needs assessment

The territorial diagnosis is the club's own strategic picture, updated every year. A community needs assessment is different: it examines a specific community, for a specific project, with that community.

Rotary defines community assessment as "the process of examining a community's strengths, weaknesses, assets, gaps, and needs to determine which issues should be addressed, existing resources to address identified gaps, and the best course of action." A Rotary microfinance guide states that Rotary Foundation global grants must include a community needs assessment.

Rotary's toolbox

Rotary publishes Community Assessment Tools. Its French edition presents six tools and says they are far from exhaustive and must be adapted to local circumstances:

Community meeting: an open meeting led by a respected facilitator.
Survey: structured questions to a wide sample.
Interview: the best way to collect qualitative information, useful where many people cannot read.
Focus group: a guided discussion with about ten people.
Asset inventory: what the community already has, including skills and solidarity.
Community mapping: participants draw their own community and discuss it.

Another edition lists eight tools, including a seasonal calendar and a daily activity schedule, two tools that are very useful in farming areas. Most assessments combine several tools.

Rotary also proposes an eight-step procedure: entrust a committee; set objectives; choose tools according to the club's resources; identify who to involve; set a calendar; carry out the assessment; analyse the results and check whether others already answer the needs; write a report and share it with the club and with everyone who took part.

What you are looking for

Rotary's CED guidance sorts economic needs into four categories: youth unemployment; barriers to entrepreneurship; barriers to agricultural opportunities and livelihoods; lack of resources to address extreme poverty. Record the assets next to the needs. Rotary warns that looking only at deficits and problems leads to projects that make the community too dependent on outside help.

If the assessment shows that the community's priority is not economic, the effort is not wasted: it has saved the club from a project nobody needed.

Involving the community

The assessment belongs to the community. Rotary's guidance gives three rules of posture: stay open and do not assume you already know local needs; see yourself as outside the process and ask a local person or association to introduce you; make no promises, but tell participants you will share the club's decisions.

In practice:

Hear everyone separately. Hold separate groups for women or young people when the culture calls for it. Include people with disabilities, the poorest households, minorities and displaced people. Ask who did not come, and why.
Ask open questions. Not "what is wrong?", which produces a shopping list, but "what has worked here before, and why?"
Give the results back. Present the findings to the people who gave them, let them correct, then decide.
Never assess to confirm. Deciding the project first and running an assessment afterwards to validate it is the most common mistake.

After a disaster, add three precautions from the Canadian toolkit. Define the "so what" before assessing: what decision will the data support? Be wary of over-assessment: "People can get weary of having multiple assessments post-disaster. If this happens, assessment results will not be true." And be humane: "Distributing surveys to distraught business owners in the wake of a disaster can be perceived as callous." Prefer personal meetings, work in pairs, and use the data you collected before the disaster. That is exactly why this module asks you to do the work now.

Diagram 1

Workshop

Our territory in 90 minutes (club board, disaster committee or CED committee; bring a printed map of the territory and coloured markers)

Risks, 20 minutes. List the hazards known from official sources and from members' memory. Score each for probability and impact. Circle the two or three priority risks.
Map, 20 minutes. On the map, colour the risk zones of the priority risks, then mark critical infrastructure, concentrations of vulnerable people and available resources.
Economy, 25 minutes. List the five activities that employ the most people or feed the most families. For each, answer: what does it depend on, which priority risk would stop it, who would lose income, what would help it restart?
People, 15 minutes. Name the local organisations and leaders who should be asked, not told: associations, cooperatives, market traders, farmers' groups, women's and youth groups, local authorities.
Next steps, 10 minutes. Decide who completes the map, who starts the interviews, and when the club presents the results back to the people it consulted.

Checklist:

☐ Official risk sources consulted and local memory collected.
☐ Probability and impact matrix completed; priority risks named.
☐ Four map layers drawn, stored offline, update date set.
☐ Main livelihoods listed with what would stop them.
☐ Community partners identified for a needs assessment.
☐ Date set to share results with the community.

Key takeaways

Know your hazards from official sources, local memory and climate trends, then rank them: two or three priority risks deserve most of the effort.
A map shows where the impact will be worst. Four layers are enough: risk zones, critical infrastructure, vulnerable people, resources.
RAGCED's contribution is the economic question: who lives from what, and what would stop after a disaster.
A community needs assessment is done with the community, with Rotary's tools, before the project is decided, and its results are given back.
Build all this in calm times. After a disaster, people are tired of questions, and the data you already have becomes precious.

Go further

From Guillaume Bourgogne's books:

Disaster Field Guide, chapter 3 "Know your risks", and the Club tier guide, section "Before: ongoing preparedness" (free at https://disasterfieldguide.org/).
Guide to community economic development for Rotary clubs (in preparation): chapter 3 "Economic diagnosis of your territory" and chapter 9 "The community needs assessment".

Public resources:

Rotary International, Community Assessment Tools; Economic and Community Development Project Strategies.
Community Toolkit for Economic Recovery and Resiliency, Canadian version, 2019.
GDACS: gdacs.org. EM-DAT: emdat.be. UNDRR PreventionWeb: preventionweb.net. USGS: earthquake.usgs.gov.
ESRAG: esrag.org.

After running this module in your club, please send your feedback (a pre-filled email), or fill in the feedback sheet in the workshop sheets and send a photo of it. It helps RAGCED improve the programme.

-CREATING OPPORTUNITIES BY INVESTING IN COMMUNITIES

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