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Disaster risk is associated not only with the occurrence of intense physical phenomena but also with the vulnerability conditions that favour or facilitate disaster when such phenomena occur. Vulnerability is intimately related to social processes in disaster prone areas and is usually related to the fragility, susceptibility or lack of resilience of the population when faced with different hazards. In other words, disasters are socio-environmental by nature and their materialization is the result of the social construction of risk. Therefore, their reduction must be part of decision-making processes. This is the case not only with post-disaster reconstruction but also with public policy formulation and development planning. As a result, institutional development must be strengthened and investment stimulated in vulnerability reduction in order to contribute to the sustainable development process in different countries. Disaster risk management requires measurement of risk, and this risk measuring requires taking into account not only the expected physical damage, victims and economic equivalent loss but also social, organizational and institutional factors. The difficulty in achieving effective disaster risk management has been, in part, the result of the lack of a comprehensive conceptual framework of disaster risk that could facilitate a multidisciplinary evaluation and intervention (Cardona, 2004). Most existing indices and evaluation techniques do not adequately express risk and are not based on a holistic approach that invites intervention.