We often call them 'natural disasters' — cyclones, bushfires, floods — that often cause death and devastation.
- Dude 101.
- Why natural disasters aren't all that natural | openDemocracy.
- La princesa (Spanish Edition).
- The Wilton Circle (was it the birth place of Shakespeares plays?).
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- Disasters are not natural;
- What we call “natural” disasters are not natural at all | Jo Scheuer.
But how 'natural' are they? Especially when the same natural phenomenon can have a vastly different impact on disparate parts of the globe. Dr Jason von Meding argues we should be more careful in our thinking around what a disaster actually means. This week, horrendous earthquakes in Indonesia.
There is No Such Thing as a Natural Disaster Anymore: Why Wilful Ignorance is Not Innocence
Rampaging fires in California. Scorching temperatures in Europe and crippling drought in Australia. Are these natural disasters or something more? He's speaking at the Edwards Hotel — since ravaged by fire. Right now I'm sure you're thinking about tsunamis, cyclones, bushfires and earthquakes. And they are of course natural. But the impact of these hazards is overwhelmingly determined by the characteristics of the people that are exposed to them. Disasters are therefore a manifestation of the structural injustice designed into modern civilisation.
We can see how this plays out every day around the world. The victims of disasters are usually impoverished. The victims of disasters usually live in poor countries. They are already marginalised in their societies based on class, gender, religion, ethnicity and disability. I myself began to research disasters after Hurricane Katrina in At the time, I was mostly concerned with the impact of hurricane force winds and storm surge on buildings.
What I quickly realised though is that without a political, social and economic context, my research would be divorced from the reality of disaster victims. When I later went to South Asia to conduct my PhD field work, I got the opportunity to actually hear directly from people who had been impacted by disasters.
That first-hand evidence convinced me that the vulnerability people experience every single day has to be part of any comprehensive disaster discourse. The injustices that they faced, whether historic or ongoing, defined their day to day existence and their living conditions, and left them vulnerable to disasters.
There's actually no such thing as a natural disaster
The way their societies evolved and were designed often left them struggling for basic dignity, let alone prepared for a natural hazard that may or may not come. What I was seeing was political, social and economic disadvantage and marginalisation.
In the event of a natural hazard, this disadvantage often produces disastrous outcomes. I have focused my research career on the people that suffer the most in disasters. I'm interested in the social constructs that determine how disasters are experienced. Disasters seemed to be everywhere in In India, Nepal and Bangladesh, record flooding led to over deaths and affected 40 million people.
Earthquakes in Mexico and Iran killed hundreds. Atlantic hurricanes Harvey, Irma and Maria were covered quite extensively in the media - the focus was mostly on the United States, but as you probably know many Caribbean islands were left devastated. To be clear — we have the engineering and technological capacities to avoid disaster impacts.
Every day engineers and scientists come up with climate and disaster smart solutions to make structures earthquake-proof, to mitigate the impact of floods, and to stave off the worst of hurricanes. And where they are affordable, but come with some cost, the institutional means to require their inclusion are often lacking, meaning what should be mandatory becomes optional.
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Hazards are natural events, occurring more or less frequently and of a greater or lesser magnitude, but disasters are due to risk-blind development. What makes hazards become disasters depends primarily on the way societies develop, build and construct. How well we assess these risks, the extent to which we inform ourselves of what could happen, and the measures we take, whether in policy, legal or construction terms, to reduce those risks, determines the extent to which that hazard becomes a disaster. We have an opportunity, each day through our development choices, to build in these measures and to avoid disaster impacts.
Global construction and urbanization are at levels never seen before in human history. A recent article in the Economist Magazine about the global demand for sand An improbable global shortage: Recognising a disaster as man-made initiates a search into the bad decisions that made it possible. Part of that is holding relevant agents responsible for culpable negligence and deterring such negligence in future.
But it is also an opportunity to ensure that systematically better choices are made in future. This kind of investigation goes wider and deeper than we are used to. President Bush's administration was widely condemned for its response to hurricane Katrina, as were local government agencies such as the New Orleans city government and police.
But that missed the deeper causes of the disaster: Those are the problems you have to fix if you want to stop the next Katrina.
These problems are not necessarily that difficult to address, or at least reduce, even by relatively poor governments. Cuba treats hurricanes as a civil defence issue and has a death rate from them that is a fraction of America's. Bangladesh's government has set up a sophisticated early warning and evacuation system: Now it is true that many people already assume that all weather-related disasters are man-made because of climate change.
But this is lazy thinking. The fact that we have so many more newsworthy weather-related disasters than we used to mainly reflects the vast increase in the number of people living in vulnerable places.
There's actually no such thing as a natural disaster | Popular Science
Any contribution made by climate change is marginal: But Houston drowned itself by expanding so recklessly: Thanks to bad human decision-making, a disaster was guaranteed whenever the next big storm came along. Likewise, famines in the horn of Africa have far less to do with changing rainfall patterns than with government failures - and wars - that permit problems such as the overpopulation of marginal arable lands to be transformed into mass starvation.
The problem of using climate change to explain everything bad that happens is that it blinds us to the real - and remediable - reasons that disasters turn out as they do. We are all responsible, but not in a way that can help. It returns us to the unhelpful place we began, in which natural disasters are inevitable.
Only now they are the inevitable outcome or perhaps punishment of humanity's fallen state of selfish overconsumption. We should stop using the phrase "natural disaster. As humans, we can review such interactions and recognise decisions that magnify or contain the inherent dangers of natural phenomena like extreme weather.
And because we can make better decisions we are responsible for doing so. We have even developed special institutions for making and improving such decision-making on our collective behalf: When a fridge catching fire causes an inferno in which 80 people die, we demand answers about how it was permitted to happen - so that it never happens again. We should do the same when government incompetence allows our cities to be flooded or shaken to the ground.