Effectiveness of a functional exercise on disaster waste management for exercise participants and its determinants

Abstract

Functional exercise, i.e. an exercise in which participants operate a specific function under a hypothetical disaster situation, is gaining attention in the field of disaster waste management. This study aims to clarify the effectiveness of functional exercise on disaster waste management for exercise participants. For this, we focused on a functional exercise conducted by Hyogo Prefectural Government in 2017, and analyzed the operations undertaken by the participants and the results of the pre-post tests quantitatively and qualitatively. The results suggest that functional exercise is effective in terms of developing a better perception of the issues and tasks, the specific skills required to undertake tasks, and information management ability for waste management in emergency circumstances.