Status of local governments' disaster preparedness targeting persons with physical disabilities in Japan

During disasters, persons with physical disabilities face various difficulties. Local governments need to improve disaster preparedness to support persons with physical disabilities.

This study aimed to identify the status and concerns of different-sized local governments in Japan on disaster preparedness (designation of welfare evacuation centers and development of individual evacuation plans) for persons with physical disabilities.

In February 2023, questionnaires were distributed among the local governments of all 1724 municipalities in Japan. In this survey, the officials responsible for disaster preparedness for persons with disabilities answered questions on welfare evacuation centers and individual evacuation plans. Further, the associations between responses and population sizes were examined using a chi-square test.

In total, 812 Japanese municipalities responded to the survey. Results revealed that approximately half of the municipalities did not have designated welfare evacuation centers. Further, the larger the population, the higher the proportion of undesignated welfare evacuation centers. At the time of this study, only 59 local governments had completed the individual evacuation plans for targeted persons. The biggest difficulty was understanding the needs of persons with disabilities.

The difficulty in designating welfare evacuation centers and developing individual evacuation plans progressively increases with the increase in a municipality's population size. Although large local governments may possess abundant disaster preparedness resources, they often find it difficult to advance such measures to persons with physical disabilities because such actions require detailed responses from these individuals.