Reduction of something harmful or the reduction of its harmful effects
Disaster mitigation
Ukraine has long played an important, yet sometimes overlooked, role in the global security order. Today, the country is on the front lines of a renewed great-power rivalry that many analysts say will dominate international relations in the decades ahead.
Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in February 2022 marked a dramatic escalation of the eight-year-old conflict that began with Russia’s annexation of Crimea and signified a historic turning point for European security. A year after the fighting began, many defense and foreign policy analysts cast the war as a major strategic blunder by Russian President Vladimir Putin.
Many observers see little prospect for a diplomatic resolution in the months ahead and instead acknowledge the potential for a dangerous escalation, which could include Russia’s use of a nuclear weapon. The war has hastened Ukraine’s push to join Western political blocs, including the European Union (EU) and the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO).
An all-hazards approach to disaster management considers all known hazards and their natural and anthropogenic potential risks and impacts, with the intention of ensuring that measures taken to mitigate one type of risk do not increase vulnerability to other types of risks. Proactive disaster mitigation (also hazard mitigation) measures are generally more effective than reactive measures in eliminating or reducing the impacts,[1] but not all disasters are reasonably foreseeable, and when an unforeseen disaster occurs, mitigation is necessarily after the fact. Proactive disaster mitigation measures may be structural or non-structural, and will generally be based on measurement and assessment of the risk and the cost of setting up the measures, and possibly the cost of maintenance.[2]
Mitigation planning identifies policies and actions that can be taken over the long term to reduce risk, and in the event of a disaster occurring, minimize loss. Such policies and actions are based on a risk assessment, using the identified hazards, vulnerabilities and probabilities of occurrence and estimates of impact to calculate risks, and are generally planned in cooperation with the stakeholder groups.[1] The principles are applicable to mitigation of risk in general.
Environmental mitigation– Measures to avoid, minimise, or compensate for adverse impacts on the environment in public administration; also, in particular:
Mitigation banking– Market-based system to compensate for environmental impacts to wetlands
Disaster Mitigation Act of 2000, a U.S. federal legislation passed in 2000 that amended provisions of the United States Code related to disaster relief
Mitigation (law), the principle that a party who has suffered loss has to take reasonable action to minimize the amount of the loss suffered
Also in law, mitigating factors may cause a crime to be considered less serious, or provide a reason to make a punishment less severe.[3]
Occupational safety and health
Mitigation of the effects of incidents and health hazards is one of the central precepts of occupational safety and health, as workers may be exposed to hazards, and that it is not always possible to eliminate the associated risk, making it necessary to deal with the consequences on those occasions when harmful incidents occur.
