The DM Cycle is the unending process of planning for, combating and recovering from disasters and minimizing their effects in its aftermaths. Disaster management is a policy intervention process, which is formal, deliberate, strategic and dynamic. In most cases, the cycle has four main phases:

1. Mitigation
Focus: Minimize or prevent life and assetloss possibilities in the long run.
– Practices: Adherence to building by-laws and construction standards, physical planning and zoning, mapping of hazardous facilities; rehabilitation and renewal of infrastructure; and stewardship of the natural environment including afforestation and other conservation endeavours.
Outcome: Safety brought down to the lowest level together with possible effects of a disaster.
2. Preparedness
Objective: It places more stress on increasing people’s, communities’ and authorities’ capability to respond to the event after its occurrence.
– Activities: Disaster response planning, capacity building, and exercises, warning systems, and community information raising.
– Outcome: Plans for and a quick reaction to an occasion that occurs.
3. Response
– Objective: Providing temporary aid to such aggregations in an effort to reduce death, pain, and additional deterioration of human lives.
Activities: Alerting and implementing desperate preparedness plans, searching, and rescuing trapped individuals, distributing Sustainable Relief Items, and providing medical care services.
Outcome: This position is sustainable while minimizing disaster’s initial effects on the stricken societies.

4. Recovery
Goals: Minority groups are returned to their condition that existed prior to the disaster and the objectives for reconstructing infrastructures, social facilities and economical stability are set.
Activities: Sprucing up from the debris, reconstruction, long-term health services, business and social welfare, and fixing shattered economies and physical structures
Outcome: Spruce up communities that are made more resilient by eradicating their susceptibilities to future calamities.

This cycle is iterative because experience in one phase enhances and underlies the next phase, over a cycle that creates a systematic attitude towards disaster preparedness and risk management.