History of Disaster Management
Disaster scholars tend to trace the development of ‘disaster management’ as a policy aim and idea back to the Lisbon Earthquake of 1775. This devastating earthquake also triggered a tsunami and several fires in the city. It occurred during and indeed fed into a time of religious and political transformation in Europe. Notably, the earthquake provoked a shift in the way many perceived disasters. In Europe, the dominant theistic view of disasters as ‘Acts of God’ was suddenly challenged by a secular, scientific view of disasters as ‘Acts of Nature’. These competing framings reflected the philosophical debates of the Enlightenment. They also enlivened the power struggle between Church and State in Europe, especially in Portugal.
Historians of disasters argue that the Lisbon earthquake prompted the new secular government of Portugal to adopt policies we now recognise as relating to disaster risk reduction and disaster management (for example,Russell Dynes). This included enforcing building regulations and developing emergency plans. But crucially, it alsoturneddisaster management into a key responsibility of the (national) government. This earthquake was not an isolated catastrophe, as proved by the outbreak of plague in Marseille, France, and famine in colonial Bengal. Based on these case studies, Bandhopadhayarguesthat the rise of disaster management as a way of thinking underpinned the formation of what we now recognise as ‘nation states’. To him, today's widely adopted government structures and responsibilities are the aftermath of this series of events. In this now recognisable arrangement of disaster management, the state assumes a role of manager and protector of its citizens against the dangers posed by an external ‘Nature’. This partly explains why the term ‘natural disasters’ has traditionally been used to label these types of events. Over the past two centuries, the techniques used to achieve disaster management have developed alongside advances in technology and infrastructure. Historically, this approach to disaster management has depended on perceptions of disasters as external threats to society which, although they cannot be prevented, can be anticipated and managed to an extent that the worst impacts can be mitigated. This approach remained dominant until at least the late 20th century. It was then that critiques began to emerge.
These critiques largely revolved around the idea that disasters were not natural. Rather, they were believed to be caused primarily by social, political, and economic processes. Or, more simply, that disasters reflect and reproduce an unsustainable approach to achieving social and economic development. The logic followed that, if different decisions on achieving development were taken, the risk of disaster could be reduced. From here, the term, research topic, and policy agenda ‘Disaster Risk Reduction’ emerged.
Key ideas and terminology in Disaster Risk Reduction
It is now generally agreed amongst disaster scholars thatdisasters are not natural. However, the statement ‘disasters are not natural’ does raise an important question:if disasters are not natural, then what are they?The United Nations Office for Disaster Risk Reduction (UNDRR)proposesthis definition as an answer:
A serious disruption of the functioning of a community or a society at any scale due to hazardous events interacting with conditions of exposure, vulnerability and capacity, leading to one or more of the following: human, material, economic and environmental losses and impacts.
This definition is theoutcomeof several decades of academic work and research which has argued that disasters involve some kind of interaction between processes which are usuallycategorisedas either hazards, vulnerabilities, and capacities (sometimes called ‘resilience’). Let’s consider each of these in turn.
Climate Change and Hazards
A more in-depth overview of Climate Change is provided by the recent IPCC report on thephysical science basis for climate change. ‘The climate’ is different from ‘the weather’: the changes which we all experience on a daily basis. Climate is rather the ‘average’ of various measurements of the weather over an extended period of time and in relation to a specific area. So, it is often just defined as ‘average weather’. Temperature is of central importance to almost all changes in weather. Because of this, experts use existing and predicted changes in average temperature alongside other variables to build complex understandings of how changes in average temperature might affect the frequency and intensity of certain harmful types of weather events in certain places. Such events include rainfall, snow, wind, and other processes. These analyses are thus linking changes in temperature to expected trends in the average weather in certain places. However, whilst these analyses canshow strong correlationsbetween changes in temperature and weather trends, expertspoint outthat our ability to attribute specific weather events to climate change with very high degrees of certainty remains fairly limited. This means, for example, that it is difficult to say with certainty that a specific storm, heatwave or rainfall event was caused by climate change. However, it is possible to say with varying degrees of certainty that climate change is making some types of weather events in certain places more or less likely, more or less frequent, and more or less intense. From this information, it is then possible to deduce that a given extreme or dangerous weather event was made more likely by climate change.
In scholarly work on climate change and disasters, these potentially dangerous weather events are often labelled ‘hazards’. The UNDRRdefinesa hazard as:
A process, phenomenon or human activity that may cause loss of life, injury or other health impacts, property damage, social and economic disruption or environmental degradation.
UNDRR attempts to broadly categorise hazards. To do so, they use environmental, geophysical, biological, hydrometeorological, and technological criteria. A more comprehensive categorisation of hazards has recently been compiled by UNDRR in partnership with the International Science Council in theirHazard definition and classification review. A brief look at this report shows some of the complexities in categorising hazards and even determining differences between hazards and vulnerabilities. Each of these issues is linked to two recent ideas about how we should understand hazards:multi-hazards, andsocionaturalhazards.
The idea of multi-hazards suggests that no hazard ever occurs alone, but is always part of a longer and wider causal chain of hazardous processes. The idea of socionatural hazards suggests that hazards are not always caused just by non-human, physical processes. In fact, disaster scholarshave pointed outthat the potential damage a hazard might cause is shaped by social processes. Such processes span fossil fuel-driven climate change, scientific understandings of hazards,political decision-makingabout hazards and risks under uncertainty, and thebuilt environment. All of these processes stem from human decisions. For example, flood hazards might be made more or less hazardous by the management of river systems. The use (or non-use) of dams, river straightening infrastructure, or dredging will make a difference in that regard. Thehistorical contextof the 2021 floods in the Indus Basin, Pakistan, demonstrates these ideas well. As a result of river mismanagement, new approaches have been taken to flood management in rivers and their surroundings. Indeed, the 'hard' engineering approaches to river management, such as dams, have often been found to break down over time, increasing the risk of large-scale flood events. Instead, river and flood management policy is shifting its attention tonature-based solutionsthat recognise flooding not just as a hazard but as a natural river process that brings many benefits, such as irrigation, increased soil fertility, and Another good example of a hazard that is often influenced by social processes is cyclones. Cyclones can be predicted and warnings provided on that basis.IndiaandBangladeshhave used this tool effectively to significantly reduce cyclone deaths in recent years. On the other hand, there is alsoevidenceto suggest that human-driven climate change is making more intense cyclones more frequent.
For the purposes of this overview, it is important to also point out that many hazardswill not be affected significantlyby climate change. The most obvious examples are hazards associated with the movement of tectonic plates. These notably include earthquakes and volcanoes. This fact could be taken to mean there is no need to consider climate change as a factor when developing disaster risk reduction policy for earthquakes and volcanoes. However, some contexts demand that climate change is considered in such decisions. For example, when building a dam to reduce reliance on fossil fuels in an area prone to earthquakes, climate change ought to be considered. It is also worth considering that climate change may reduce the frequency of impacts or the extent of hazards in some places. Examples might include extreme cold weather in some areas or the risk of flooding in others. Atool, co-produced by the UK Met Office and the BBC, illustrates how these variations exist not only internationally, but also within countries - in this case, the UK. Acknowledging these complexities has prompted some disaster scholars toquestionthe importance of categorising hazards as social or natural, or as totally separate from vulnerabilities.
Vulnerabilities and the social side of disasters
The UNDRRdefinesvulnerabilities as:
The conditions determined by physical, social, economic and environmental factors or processes which increase the susceptibility of an individual, a community, assets or systems to the impacts of hazards.
The idea of vulnerability in disasters directs attention to how physical, social, political, economic, and cultural processes put people in harm’s way. Being vulnerable, in that sense, would mean having a higher probability of being harmed by a potential disaster due to these processes. The development of theories of vulnerability is also largely responsible for the shift in thinking about the ‘naturalness’ of disasters. One of the most influential theories was the bookAt Risk II: Natural Hazards, People’s Vulnerability and Disaster, first published in 1994. The most well-known part of the book is the Pressure and Release Model, which tries to illustrate how disasters happen. Its overall argument is that if vulnerability is the ‘root cause’ of disasters, reducing vulnerability should be the main goal of ‘Disaster Risk Reduction’.
The 1976 earthquake in Guatemala, studied in At Risk II, and a whole host of other cases, showed a strong correlation between disaster impacts and socioeconomic class. This research feeds into left-wing, Marxist-inspired conceptual frameworks. Itfoundthat poorer people are often more exposed to the impacts of hazards and usually less able to deal with the long-term impacts than those of a higher socioeconomic class. All in all, this theory describes reality as follows: the poorer you are, the more vulnerable you are to potential disasters.
This theory has reinforced the assumption that poorer and marginalised people are often forced to live in places which are more exposed to the impacts of hazards because they cannot afford to live elsewhere. This might be along a river prone to flooding or on a steep slope prone to landslides. An extreme but clear example of these drivers of vulnerability would be Rohingya refugeesliving in overcrowded campswhich are exposed to cyclones, floods, and landslides as well as a host of health and sanitation issues. Beyond the role of socially and politically constructed poverty,researchhas also suggested that people might choose to live in such places on purpose. Indeed, these poor populations may have determined that the benefits of doing so outweigh the potential risk of disaster. They may have economic and cultural advantages in settling in suchareas. Scholars of gender and disasters would also point out that the experience of vulnerability is not the same for men, women, and other gender identities. The same issue of different experiences ofsocial vulnerability to natural hazardscan be made forother groups who are marginalisedfor non-economic reasons. Skin colour, religious belief, age, ability, and other variables can affect their vulnerability. Because of these complexities, most scholarsagreethat although vulnerability is often closely tied to socioeconomic class, it is also always tied to context, culture, and other shifting social relations.
Despite its importance to the field, some scholars arecritical of the idea of vulnerability. Many have argued that a focus on vulnerability is too negative and tends to frame disaster victims as inferior or helpless. For scholar Greg Bankoff, such a framing evenreflects a colonial worldview. As a result, it has been argued that it is very important to think about people’s capacities to deal with the processes that make them vulnerable, and to understand and deal with hazards. Such a shift in perception would mean that exposed populations would no longer be passive victims. Instead, they would actively prepare for and respond to crises.
Capacities and resilience
The UNDRRdefinescapacity as:
The combination of all the strengths, attributes and resources available within an organization, community or society to manage and reduce disaster risks and strengthen resilience.
The development of theories of capacities, as they relate to disasters, emerged to provide a more optimistic view of the ‘social’ aspects of disasters. Some scholarsargueit is essential to not only focus on how people are put at risk by processes beyond their control, but rather to think about how they might work against these forces to reduce the risks they face. This is important not only because it corrects the view that people vulnerable to the impacts of disasters are helpless or without agency. It also matters because such a focus can inform proactive policy and practices. The end result would then bemore waysto ‘build’ capacity and resilience and ‘reduce’ vulnerability.
Governments, communities, and individuals all hold the capacity to prevent the possibility of disaster. For example, they can create and enforce building regulations to prevent building collapse during earthquakes. They may also work on clearing drains in advance of the monsoon season to reduce flood and landslide risk. However, scholars have consistentlypointed outthat thinking of capacity as the inverse of vulnerability is an oversimplification. In the real world, people usually have the capacity and resilience to deal with disasters. This is the case even though they live in conditions of vulnerability due to processes beyond their control. Gemma Sou’s recent work on the impacts of Hurricane Maria on Puerto Rico is a useful demonstration of this idea - visualised in agraphic novel. Soureframes resiliencenot just as the ability to deal with the impacts of the disaster, but also to resist and deal with other forces, i.e. the neo-colonial attitude of the United States towards Puerto Rico. This nuance is important. It reinforces the idea that people affected by disasters are not inherently ‘vulnerable’ but rather creative, strong, and cooperative. This re-framing of resilience directs attention to the political, economic, and cultural processes that have and continue to marginalise them before, during, and after disastrous events and processes. Overall, it is vital to consider both capacities and vulnerabilities asdistinct but interconnected issueswhich are always dependent on the hazards and contexts in question. This fundamental understanding of disasters isnot changed significantlyby integrating climate change into the conversation.
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