27 April 2020, NIICE Commentary 4249
Dr. Ilan Kelman
To understand the causes of disasters, consider how society can or cannot deal with earthquakes, hurricanes, viruses, volcanic eruptions, and other planetary events and phenomena. This refers to the fact that humans are vulnerable to such happenings, because societal actions force communities and people face problems when encountering events and processes that we call ‘disasters’. It could be poorly constructed buildings, breaking planning regulations, silencing doctors who raise the alarm about a new disease, not having (or not being able to afford) insurance, poor communication of warnings, or fear of assault in an evacuation shelter.
Many other barriers produced by society, and never by nature, create challenges in living with the environment, even when we implement our combined knowledge. People are frequently marginalised, oppressed, and discriminated against based on sexuality, sex, gender, ethnicity, religion, race, disability, or other personal factors. This reduces their options, opportunities, and resources, so that they have fewer choices regarding their lives, livelihoods, and settlements. The disaster is nothing but the perpetuation of vulnerability, which harms us not because the Earth is being violent to us, but because we have created problems for ourselves; problems which make us vulnerable.
As is often noted, earthquakes don’t kill people, collapsing infrastructure does. The earthquake happens quickly, but it takes a long time and complex societal processes for the urban planning, building codes and construction to manifest, ultimately for these structures to collapse and kill people. The baseline cause of the earthquake disaster is not the earthquake, but the choices to construct infrastructure which cannot withstand an earthquake. Same with the 26 December 2004 tsunami that took place around the Indian Ocean. We had plenty of scope for warning systems to save the 250,000 lives lost, but we chose not to apply or spread our knowledge.
Pacific tsunami warnings started in 1949. International coordination around the Pacific began in 1960, leading to efforts in the 1970s to create a similar system for the Indian Ocean. The Indian Ocean tsunami warning system was always too expensive; other priorities always superseded it. The current Indian Ocean tsunami warning system started operating just eighteen months after the 2004 catastrophe. Now, the problems emerge from the lack of maintenance – again constituted by our choices about priorities.
Even a comet or an asteroid heading towards the Earth would not induce a natural disaster. We have some space monitoring networks and some readiness to deflect or destroy dangerous objects, but we have a long way to go to fully safeguard our planet. It is our choice to provide at least some surveillance and response capability, rather than being absolutely certain that we could avert a major impact.
From Haiti’s 2010 earthquake to Australia’s 2020 bushfires, those who suffer the most tend to have few options to counter their vulnerability; vulnerability which may have been created by others, more often than not. It takes a long time to build these settlements and societies, which means that it takes a long time to make up the vulnerabilities which cause the disaster. All disasters are slow-onset. We should not blame disasters on nature. Disasters emerge from society’s actions. So, we should prefer not to use the term “natural disaster”. Instead, they are simply, “disasters”.
