essay on are human beings responsible for natural disasters

Human activity the common link between disasters around the world

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Disasters such as cyclones, floods, and droughts are more connected than we might think, and human activity is the common thread, a UN report released on Wednesday reveals.

The study from the UN University, the academic and research arm of the UN, looks at 10 different disasters that occurred in 2020 and 2021, and finds that, even though they occurred in very different locations and do not initially appear to have much in common, they are, in fact, interconnected.

A consequence of human influence

The study builds on the ground-breaking Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change ( IPCC ) assessment released on 9 August, and based on improved data on historic heating, which showed that human influence has warmed the climate at a rate that is unprecedented in at least the last 2,000 years. António Guterres, the UN Secretary-General described the IPCC assessment as a “code red for humanity”.

Over the 2020-2021 period covered by the UN University, several record-breaking disasters took place, including the COVID-19 pandemic, a cold wave which crippled the US state of Texas, wildfires which destroyed almost 5 million acres of Amazon rainforest, and 9 heavy storms in Viet Nam - in the span of only 7 weeks.

Arctic-Texas link

Whilst these disasters occurred thousands of miles apart, the study shows how they are related to one another, and can have consequences for people living in distant places.

An example of this is the recent heatwave in the Arctic and cold wave in Texas. In 2020, the Arctic experienced unusually high air temperatures, and the second-lowest amount of sea ice cover on record.

This warm air destabilized the polar vortex, a spinning mass of cold air above the North Pole, allowing colder air to move southward into North America, contributing to the sub-zero temperatures in Texas, during which the power grid froze up, and 210 people died.

COVID and the Cyclone

Another example of the connections between disasters included in the study and the pandemic, is Cyclone Amphan, which struck the border region of India and Bangladesh.

In an area where almost 50 per cent of the population is living under the poverty line, the COVID-19 pandemic and subsequent lockdowns left many people without any way to make a living, including migrant workers who were forced to return to their home areas and were housed in cyclone shelters while under quarantine.

When the region was hit by Cyclone Amphan, many people, concerned over social distancing, hygiene and privacy, avoided the shelters and decided to weather the storm in unsecure locations. In the aftermath, there was a spike in COVID-19 cases, compounding the 100 fatalities directly caused by Amphan, which also caused damage in excess of 13 billion USD and displaced 4.9 million people.

Root causes

The new report identifies three root causes that affected most of the events in the analysis: human-induced greenhouse gas emissions, insufficient disaster risk management, and undervaluing environmental costs and benefits in decision-making.

The first of these, human induced greenhouse gas emissions, is identified as one of the reasons why Texas experienced freezing temperatures, but these emissions also contribute to the formation of super cyclones such as Cyclone Amphan, on the other side of the world.

Insufficient disaster risk management, notes the study, was one of the reasons why Texas experienced such high losses of life and excessive infrastructure damage during the cold snap, and also contributed to the high losses caused by the Central Viet Nam floods.

The report also shows how the record rate of deforestation in the Amazon is linked to the high global demand for meat: this demand has led to an increase in the need for soy, which is used as animal feed for poultry. As a result, tracts of forest are being cut down.

“What we can learn from this report is that disasters we see happening around the world are much more interconnected than we may realize, and they are also connected to individual behaviour”, says one of the report’s authors, UNU scientist Jack O’Connor. “Our actions have consequences, for all of us,”

Solutions also linked

However, Mr. O’Connor is adamant that, just as the problems are interlinked, so are the solutions.

The report shows that cutting harmful greenhouse gas emissions can positively affect the outcome of many different types of disasters, prevent a further increase in the frequency and severity of hazards, and protect biodiversity and ecosystems.

Interconnected disasters

Interconnected Disaster Risks 2020/2021, is released by the United Nations University’s Institute for Environment and Human Security ( UNU-EHS ), which conducts research on risks and adaptation related to environmental hazards and global change.

The institute’s research promotes policies and programmes to reduce these risks, taking into account the interplay between environmental and societal factors.

Research areas include climate change adaptation by incorporating insurance-related approaches, environmentally-induced migration and social vulnerability, ecosystem-based solutions to adaptation and disaster risk reduction, and models and tools to analyse vulnerability and risks linked to natural hazards.

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Humans impact the physical environment in many ways: overpopulation, pollution, burning fossil fuels, and deforestation. Changes like these have triggered climate change, soil erosion, poor air quality, and undrinkable water. These negative impacts can affect human behavior and can prompt mass migrations or battles over clean water.

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• Mutation as a source of variation
• Introduced species and biodiversity
• Invasive species
• Human activities that threaten biodiversity
• How does climate change affect biodiversity?
• How did all dinosaurs except birds go extinct?
• Were dinosaurs undergoing long-term decline before mass extinction?

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Human impact on biodiversity

Human-mediated causes of biodiversity loss.

• Land-use change : Humans may destroy natural landscapes as they mine resources and urbanize areas. This is detrimental, as it displaces residing species, reducing available habitats and food sources.
• Pollution : Pollution can occur from the runoff or disposal of chemical substances, or from energy sources (noise and light pollution).
• Introduced species : Humans may unintentionally, or intentionally, introduce a non-native species into an ecosystem. This can negatively effect an ecosystem because the introduced species may outcompete native organisms and displace them.
• Resource exploitation : Humans consume large amounts of resources for their own needs. Some examples include the mining of natural resources like coal, the hunting and fishing of animals for food, and the clearing of forests for urbanization and wood use. Extensive overuse of nonrenewable resources , like fossil fuels, can cause great harm to the environment. Recycling products made from nonrenewable resources (such as plastic, which is made from oil) is one way to reduce the negative impacts of this resource exploitation. In addition, the development and use of renewable resources , like solar or wind energy, can help decrease the harmful effects of resource exploitation.

Climate change and biodiversity

Conservation, common mistakes and misconceptions.

• The extinction rate is currently 1,000-10,000 times higher than the natural extinction rate. Some people think that extinction is not a relevant issue, but it is actually more relevant than ever! Historically, the natural extinction rate is between 1-5 species-level extinctions per year. Human impact has caused this rate to jump to a significantly higher rate, offsetting the balance of biodiversity.
• The greenhouse effect is not all negative. Although we talk about greenhouse gases producing a negative impact (global change), the greenhouse effect serves a natural purpose: maintaining the warmth that sustains life on Earth. The problem arises when too much heat is trapped, causing a rise in average global temperature.
• An individual person can have an effect on biodiversity. Although biodiversity loss may be a large-scale problem, reducing threats to biodiversity can begin with a single individual. Smaller efforts, such as reusing or recycling items, or even purchasing sustainable foods, can have a culminating effect. That is, if each person did these things, even just a little, they would add up and help reduce biodiversity loss!

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News Analysis

Humans Are Making Hurricanes Worse. Here’s How.

By John Schwartz

When hurricane Florence struck the Carolinas last week, humanity played a role in the destruction.

Human intervention is making natural disasters unnaturally harmful, both in causes and effects, and the number of ways our own influence is making things worse, taken together, is sobering.

On a global scale, we are bolstering the destructive potential of hurricanes and other extreme weather events by driving climate change. At the local level, we remain reluctant to deal with the problems of our own making, building and rebuilding in risky areas even as we avoid the policies and investment that would help mitigate the threats.

Kim Cobb, a climate scientist at the Georgia Institute of Technology, said that people tended to think of climate change as an abstract problem with only technocratic solutions. But it is getting more concrete all the time, and requires real-life action in response.

“This year has shown us that climate change is a present-day threat to the safety and livelihoods of communities across America,” she said. “Some communities are tackling these issues head on, but some have their heads in the sand.”

‘Human interference’ is making hurricanes more destructive

The human contribution to heating up the planet by burning fossil fuels is already nudging up the destructiveness of hurricanes like Florence and last year’s Hurricane Harvey in some ways, and will have even greater effects over time: “Climate change is expected to make intense hurricanes more intense,” said Andrew Dessler, a climate expert at Texas A&M University.

The consequences of human-driven climate change on hurricanes plays out in a number of ways. Hurricanes get energy from warm ocean water, and the oceans are heating up. (The waters Florence encountered were, in fact, warmer than normal .) Compounding the problem, warmer air can hold more moisture, which can lead to the kinds of intense rain events and high levels of inland flooding associated with storms like Florence.

On top of that, Dr. Dessler said, sea levels have already risen because of global warming, and those heightened sea levels make storm surge levels higher, pushing more water onto land and creating even more flooding.

Other research suggests that climate change is weakening the atmospheric currents that tend to move weather systems along during the summer months. That makes storms like Harvey and Florence stall while they dump stunning amounts of water over the landscape, so that even a storm without catastrophically powerful winds can do tremendous damage, even far inland.

Researchers working in the field of attribution science, which searches for possible links to climate in individual weather events, have suggested that Hurricane Harvey’s rainfall was 38 percent higher over what would have been expected in a world without climate change.

That branch of science is evolving, and speeding up: Researchers led by Prof. Kevin A. Reed of Stony Brook University published a prospective look at the effects of climate change on Hurricane Florence as it neared landfall last week. They estimated that the storm’s heaviest rainfall would be 50 percent greater, and the size of the storm some 50 miles wider, because of the human interference in the climate system.”

Politics and policies put people in harm’s way

Damage from such powerful storms is becoming increasingly expensive. Costs in the United States could increase by $23 billion per year by the middle of this century if steps aren’t taken to adapt coastal communities, the Government Accountability Office warned in a recent report .

Yet the Federal Emergency Management Agency, which leads recovery efforts and pays insured homeowners for their flood damage , primarily uses historical records in mapping flood risk , a system that underestimates the risk to come because of the accelerating nature of climate change.

After disaster strikes, federal policies favor paying people to rebuild in place rather than helping them relocate to safer ground. The Natural Resources Defense Council, an environmental group, has called that tendency “flood, rebuild, repeat,” citing $5.5 billion spent between 1978 and 2015 to repair or rebuild more than 30,000 properties that had already flooded multiple times.

And Americans keep moving to the coasts. The population of the Atlantic and Gulf Coast regions jumped from 52 million in 2000 to nearly 60 million in 2016, according to the Census Bureau . In flood-prone areas, rapid development often means paving over much of the landscape that might absorb floodwaters, which was certainly a factor in the Houston area when Harvey came.

Our propensity to engage in poor planning is not newly discovered. The geographer Gilbert F. White, known as the father of floodplain management, wrote in 1942 that “floods are ‘acts of God,’ but flood losses are largely acts of man.” That means that any steps we take to avoid building in places with flood risk should minimize the cost of disasters.

Russel L. Honoré, the retired Army lieutenant general whom President George W. Bush placed in charge of Hurricane Katrina recovery efforts after initial stumbles, has more blunt advice in the title of his new book: “ Don’t Get Stuck on Stupid .”

“If you live on a street named River Road,” he said in an interview, your home “is going to flood.” But the problems stem not only from personal choices but also from a lack of national will to make things better, he said.

Far from fighting, mitigating or adapting to global warming, the federal government is rolling back Obama-era climate policies . President Trump, who has called climate change a hoax , is withdrawing the United States from the Paris Agreement, the world’s biggest climate pact. He says that regulations designed to combat climate change are a drag on the economy.

When governments do act, it is often after disaster has already struck. New Orleans got $20 billion in new hurricane protection from federal, state and local sources, but only after damage from Katrina cost the region some $135 billion .

This year, voters in Harris County, Tex., which includes Houston, passed a $2.5 billion bond measure after Harvey to better protect the area from future storms and to buy out homes in some of the riskiest areas.

Humans have a hard time planning ahead

Jim Blackburn, a professor of environmental law at Rice University in Houston, said that the bond measure was a start, but that attitudes had not changed enough after years of sprawling development and inadequate flood planning.

He recalled that after Hurricane Ike struck the Texas coast in 2008, FEMA paid for signs in the community of Clear Lake, near Houston, that were intended to tell homeowners how high surge waters from a major storm would rise there. Local officials, besieged with complaints from residents and real estate agents, took the signs down .

“The bottom line is we really don’t want to deal with this problem yet,” Mr. Blackburn said. “We’re more interested in selling houses than we are in taking care of people.”

What explains the lack of action to stave off climate change at the global level and to address issues of resilience and adaptation at the local level? Katharine Hayhoe, a climate scientist at Texas Tech University, suggested it goes back to a fundamental human flaw.

Long-range planning is necessary to confront the threat of climate change, but “psychologically, we’re just not designed to do that,” she said. Humans are most acutely attuned to immediate threats, she added: “We are evolved to run away from the bear, not plan for long-term food supply.”

General Honoré said he uses strategies to make the problem feel more real to audiences unwilling to accept that climate change was happening. “I ask, ‘Do you know of a place you used to be able to fish, and you can’t fish any more?’ ” he said. “They all raise their hands.”

John Schwartz is part of the climate team. Since joining The Times in 2000, he has covered science, law, technology, the space program and more, and has written for almost every section. More about John Schwartz

Learn More About Climate Change

Have questions about climate change? Our F.A.Q. will tackle your climate questions, big and small .

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Cattle ranches have ruled the Amazon for decades. Now, new companies are selling something else: the ability of trees to lock away planet-warming carbon .

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• Published: 10 January 2022

Stop blaming the climate for disasters

• Emmanuel Raju   ORCID: orcid.org/0000-0002-2348-1850 1 , 2 ,
• Emily Boyd   ORCID: orcid.org/0000-0002-1643-9718 3 &
• Friederike Otto 4  

Communications Earth & Environment volume  3 , Article number:  1 ( 2022 ) Cite this article

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• Climate-change adaptation
• Environmental studies
• Natural hazards

Disasters occur when hazards meet vulnerability. We must acknowledge the human-made components of both vulnerability and hazard and emphasize human agency in order to proactively reduce disaster impacts.

Natural hazards such as floods, droughts and heatwaves become disasters as a result of societal vulnerability, that is, a propensity of people, societies and ecosystems to be harmed. Often, people’s social, political and economic status determines the nature of differential and disproportionate impacts 1 . In addition, many natural hazards are not just natural processes, but have been made more likely and more intense by human-caused climate change 2 . This has long been recognized 3 , 4 , 5 , yet disasters continue to be construed as an ‘Act of God’ or described as ‘natural’.

Here we argue that a discourse in which the role of human activity in disasters is clearly communicated—as opposed to blaming Nature or the Climate—will be more conducive to a proactive, equitable and ultimately successful approach to reducing impacts of disasters.

Pointing the finger at natural causes creates a politically convenient crisis narrative that is used to justify reactive disaster laws and policies

From hazard to disaster

References to climate-related hazards such as floods, droughts and heatwaves as ‘climate’ or ‘natural’ disasters suggest that disasters are independent of vulnerability. They are not. And vulnerability is often constructed; examples include unplanned urbanization processes, systemic injustice (such as some people being denied access to resources), and marginalization due to religion, caste, class, ethnicity, gender or age 1 , 4 . Vulnerability is therefore a product of social and political processes that include elements of power and (poor) governance. These structural inequalities are created in ways that are often deliberate and anchored in social and political structures 6 .

For example, in urban areas, natural hazards become disasters due to poor urban planning processes that are not risk-informed. The results are inadequate infrastructure, a lack of social support systems that could reduce impacts or help with recovery from past disasters, and processes that push the most vulnerable groups of people to live in hazardous areas. This causes disproportionate impacts (visible and invisible loss and damage) 7 , especially where there are multiple hazards at the same time. These kinds of impacts have been seen during the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic 8 : the COVID-19 pandemic in combination with other natural hazards in many parts of the world may have pushed already vulnerable populations into further vulnerability, which is being referred to as compounded vulnerabilities. For example, during the pandemic, lack of access to health care systems in many settings compounded with the lack of other social protection systems, and poor disaster risk reduction measures and governance has exacerbated the impacts of these hazards.

Accept responsibility

Blaming nature or the climate for disasters deflects responsibility. It is largely human influence that produces vulnerability. Pointing the finger at natural causes creates a politically convenient crisis narrative that is used to justify reactive disaster laws and policies 9 . For example, it is easier for city governments to blame nature instead of addressing human-caused social and physical vulnerability. A deflection of responsibility also leads to a continuation of an unequitable status quo where the most vulnerable people in society are worst affected repeatedly in every disaster. A discourse that attributes disasters to nature paves a subtle exit path for those responsible for creating vulnerability.

Towards a change of perspective

Assessments of climate-related hazards too often focus on indicators on spatial scales that are based on climate model grid points, such as the hottest day of the year to indicate change in extreme heat 10 or the meteorologically most extreme events 11 . Instead, to help with reducing disaster impacts, it would be more informative to assess hazards at the temporal and spatial scales that are relevant from a risk and vulnerability point of view, such as looking at heatwaves that cross a particular temperature threshold in cities, on a day or a few days, rather than estimating country scale heat extremes. Spatial scales of assessment can make a big difference: the 2018 European heatwave has been estimated to have become 30 times more likely as a result of climate change – but the extreme heat over the 3 days when mortality was highest only became 2–5 times more likely in individual European cities 12 .

Climate science and attribution has an important role to play 13 , for example, in disentangling where human-induced climate change is a key driver of hazards 14 . This is important: where climate change has exacerbated risk, it is likely that the hazard will worsen over time, and past observations become increasingly less relevant. Climate change attribution must also be used to communicate which disasters today are partially or wholly a result of human-induced climate change.

In the wake of the 6th Assessment Report from Working Group I of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, there is opportunity to reflect and act. Disaster impacts can be reduced drastically. We must stop blaming Nature or the Climate for disasters, and put vulnerability and equity 15 at the centre of proactive and engaging disaster laws and policies 9 . Such a basic conceptual re-orientation is a necessary starting point to identify and leverage structural, systemic and enabling solutions that transform societies to be more equitable and resilient in the long term.

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Global Health Section, Copenhagen Centre for Disaster Research; Department of Public Health, University of Copenhagen, Copenhagen, Denmark

Emmanuel Raju

Unit for Environmental Sciences and Management; African Centre for Disaster Studies, North-West University, Potchesftroom, South Africa

Lund University Centre for Sustainable Studies, Lund University, Lund, Sweden

Grantham Institute, Imperial College London, London, UK

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E.R.—conceptualization. E.R., E.B. and F.O. contributed equally to the writing and revision of this manuscript.

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Moral responsibility for natural disasters

• Vilius Dranseika

My aim in this paper is to explore the idea of human moral responsibility for (the outcomes) of natural disasters. First, I discuss the claim that there is often a human causal contribution to negative outcomes of even such paradigmatic natural disasters as earthquakes, typhoons, and volcano eruptions. Second, I attempt to move away from discussions attributing human causal responsibility to discussions attributing human moral responsibility for such outcomes (and to the obstacles to such attributions). I suggest that in most (perhaps even all) cases of moral responsibility for the outcomes of natural disasters moral responsibility is grounded in culpable negligence, including culpable failure to prevent the side-effects of our actions or omissions.

Introduction

Most of the current work on applying moral theories to disasters focuses on analysing moral responsibilities in dealing with (the outcomes of) disasters. This set of issues covers ethical problems of disaster relief, research during disasters, issues of resource allocation and many other issues that are sometimes summarized under the heading Disaster Bioethics ( Annas, 2010 ; O’Mathúna et al., 2014 ; Mallia, 2015 ). In the present paper, however, I attempt to shed some light on a different set of issues: moral responsibility for (the outcomes of) disasters. Can human agents ever be justifiably held morally responsible for the outcomes of natural disasters? And if so, what is the nature of such responsibility ascriptions and why are they important?

One may be tempted to immediately answer in the negative. The very notion of a natural disaster seems to suggest that natural disasters are “natural” precisely because they are not man-made. Furthermore, most of the public, especially in the West, no longer interpret natural disasters as justified responses by supernatural powers to human wickedness—the causes and process by which natural disasters unfold seem to be put firmly outside the moral order. “Since Lisbon [earthquake of 1755], natural evils no longer have any seemly relation to moral evils, hence they no longer have meaning at all. Natural disaster is the object of attempts at prediction and control, not of interpretation” writes Susan Neiman in her book Evil in Modern Thought (2004, p. 250) where she also notes that explanations for natural disasters formulated in terms of God’s purposes are now “generally confined to fundamentalist sects and hapless victims” (ibid., p. 249).

While I do not wish to revive supernatural explanations for natural disasters, especially explanations that put blame on the victims of those disasters, I do, however, wish, in this article, to elucidate a different sense in which current thinking about natural disasters is once again deeply intertwined with questions of moral responsibility. My argument proceeds in two steps. First, I point to the limitations of a strict distinction between natural and man- made disasters—often there is a human causal contribution to negative outcomes of even such paradigmatic natural disasters as are earthquakes, typhoons, and volcano eruptions. Crucially, such potential for causal contribution by human agents is becoming widely known and recognized. Second, I attempt to move away from attributions of human causal responsibility to discussions of attributing human moral responsibility for such outcomes (and to the obstacles to such attributions).

Causal responsibility for the outcomes of natural disasters

Although natural disasters are no longer understood, at least by most of the public, as justified responses by supernatural powers to human wickedness, natural disasters can still be seen as belonging to the domain of morality, albeit in a different sense. Not as divine punishments for human misdeeds, but as something that at least sometimes can be aggravated or alleviated by human choices. Once it becomes recognized that humans may be in a position to exert influence on the outcomes of at least some natural disasters, a space opens up for the moral evaluation of the actions of those involved.

Jean-Jacques Rousseau, in his letter to Voltaire of 18 August, 1756, in which he discussed Voltaire’s “Poem on the Lisbon Disaster”, wrote the following:

[I]t was hardly nature who assembled there twenty-thousand houses of six or seven stories. If the residents of this large city had been more evenly dispersed and less densely housed, the losses would have been fewer or perhaps none at all. Everyone would have fled at the first shock, and would have been seen two days later, twenty leagues away and as happy as if nothing had happened. [..] For me, I see everywhere that the misfortunes nature imposes upon us are much less cruel than those that we please to add ( Rousseau, 1756 ).

This remark is interesting in at least two ways. First, it blurs the distinction between natural and man-made disasters: the negative outcomes of natural events are in part, perhaps a crucial part, caused by earlier human actions. The architectural design, the quality of the buildings, the behaviour during the earthquake are all part of a complex causal chain that, according to Rousseau, resulted in the extreme devastation of Lisbon. The fact that this chain of events was triggered by a purely natural cause is not the whole story; as far as outcomes are concerned, it may not even be the most important part of the story. Second, this remark stresses the social aspects of disaster and thereby foreshadows current notions of resilience in a disaster context. The two ideas—causality and social resilience—are related: to be resilient is, among other things, to be able to soften the outcomes of disaster, either by setting safeguards in the initial conditions or by shaping the causal processes of the disaster as they unfold.

There are several definitions of resilience but perhaps the most widely cited and employed is the one by the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development: “Resilience is [...] the ability of individuals, communities and states and their institutions to absorb and recover from shocks, whilst positively adapting and transforming their structures and means for living in the face of long-term changes and uncertainty” ( 2013 ). Discussions of resilience often focus on comparisons of two natural events that as natural phenomena share similar properties. These two events are then contrasted by showing the drastic differences in their outcomes in terms of death toll and property damage ( Ten Have, 2014 , pp. 18-19). One widely discussed example was a comparison of the Haiti and New Zealand earthquakes of 2010. These two events shared significant similarities in terms of the power of the earthquake and their epicentres being in the vicinity of major population centres but had very different outcomes in terms of deaths: at least 100,000 people died in Haiti and nobody died in New Zealand. At least part of the explanation for this difference is attributed to different levels of disaster preparedness and resilience. “The same level of severe shaking would cause 10 to 30 people to die per million residents in California, but 1,000 maybe more in Nepal, and up to 10,000 in parts of Pakistan, India, Iran and China”, said seismologist David Wald, interviewed for a recent newspaper article on the Nepal earthquake ( Borenstein, 2015 ).

Resilience (and, of course, its opposite—vulnerability) comes in two flavours. On the one hand, we can talk about the ability or lack of ability to forecast natural threats and plan actions accordingly in the face of these threats. This is often very difficult. For example, an important element in the disaster at the Fukushima nuclear plant in Japan in 2011 was the fact that the cooling systems servicing the reactors were disabled by the tsunami wave. When the systems were installed, engineers had little reason to expect that tidal waves could be so high. In other situations, for example in forecasting typhoon trajectories and strength, the current state of knowledge can often mean that forecasts are issued early enough and precisely enough to plan evacuation and, although perhaps not much can be done to prevent material damage, the number of human victims can often be lowered substantially.

The second type of resilience is related to human activities that have the propensity to increase or decrease the likelihood or potential extent of a disaster. For example, landslides become more likely if deforestation occurs on slopes in mountainous areas, while poorly designed and maintained dams can increase the likelihood of devastating floods, and overgrazing may lead to desertification and increase the likelihood and severity of droughts. Reforesting or artificially strengthening the slopes may, conversely, decrease the likelihood of landslides. This type of resilience also includes psychological or community resilience, understood as the capacity of individuals and communities to cope with the impact of the disaster.

Both types of resilience challenge the distinction between natural and man-made disasters. Even in the first case, granted the distinction made between natural processes and human reactions to those processes based on scientific forecasts, the outcomes of disasters depend on both these two factors. It is even clearer in the second case. Of course, in some situations the extent and nature of the potential catastrophe may be such that in current conditions it would be impossible to build resilience (in either of the two senses): for example, in the case of the imminent impact of a massive asteroid. Nonetheless, in many of the cases traditionally treated as natural disasters, people, communities or states can exert an influence on both types of resilience.

So what kinds of human causal contribution can be identified in natural disasters? One way to make the distinction is by showing that human activities can either be triggering causes of disaster or they can be structuring causes that shape the process leading to the outcomes of the disaster. This distinction is borrowed from Fred Dretske (2004) . Cases of natural disasters caused by human trigger alone are perhaps rare, not least because they pose a conceptual issue: it may be awkward to call such situations natural disasters. However, examples can be found. It is very likely that the Sidoarjo mud flow—a mud volcano in eruption since 2006 in Indonesia—was triggered by drilling for natural gas. Forest fires can be triggered by bonfires that were left without being properly extinguished. There may also be more indirect, perhaps probabilistic, human influences on natural events. Examples may be found in forecasts by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change that climate change induced by human activity will lead to more frequent extreme weather events or claims by the Red Cross in their World Disaster Report that human-induced climate change will result in more frequent droughts, floods or malaria outbreaks.

Structuring causes include a set of initial conditions in which the disaster unfolds; some of these conditions will be natural, some man-made. For example, the high-rise buildings in Lisbon, mentioned by Rousseau, were a part of the complex of conditions that shaped the outcomes of the earthquake.

Sometimes the same set of human activities can be both triggering and structuring causes: imagine the deforestation of a slope that both increases the probability of a landslide being triggered and the degree of severity.

In addition to causation by action it is important to mention causation by omission. Sometimes normative expectations can shape the normative context within which omissions and failures are seen as being causally efficient (see Haldane, 2011 ; Williams, 1995 ). As noted by Asscher (2008) , omissions become something a person can be blamed for only in the context of “surrounding responsibility”. Sometimes it can be appropriate to say that negative outcomes were caused in part by early-warning systems not working as they should, by relevant officials not organizing evacuation or not taking preventive steps of resilience-building.

For the purposes of this paper, it is important to note that there is increasing recognition and knowledge of aspects of the human causal influences on the processes involved in natural disasters. We have increasingly more scientific information on disaster risks, early-warning systems are becoming more effective and more widespread, and also the public in at least some parts of the world are becoming more perceptive to the potential of human-caused environmental degradation and climate change increasing the likelihood or scale of a disaster.

Moral responsibility for the outcomes of natural disasters

There is a long tradition in philosophy of distinguishing between human evil and natural evil. Human evil is traditionally understood to be suffering that results from human activity, while natural evil occurs without direct human involvement. Historically, some of the most frequently discussed examples of natural evil have been natural disasters, such as the 1755 Lisbon earthquake. Current thinking has it, however, that this distinction, as applied to natural disasters, is deeply problematic. Natural disasters are complex events that are triggered and shaped by a set of both natural and man-made causes and initial conditions. The previous section discussed some of the reasons for treating the distinction with care.

The traditional distinction between natural evil and human evil is related to (but is not equivalent to) another traditional distinction between natural evil and moral evil. Human participation in causal processes that lead to natural disasters having negative outcomes does not necessarily mean that we deal with the human moral responsibility for the negative consequences of these processes. For example, if a hurricane wind tosses me into someone who is thereby hurt, I am clearly a part of the causal chain leading to this suffering. Yet, typically I will not be held morally responsible for the suffering.

In other situations we can justifiably be held or hold someone else responsible and culpable for the outcomes of a natural disaster. Yet, we never (or almost never) encounter paradigmatic cases of moral responsibility in the context of natural disasters. That is, if by paradigmatic cases we mean planned actions that are based on the intention to cause the disaster or aggravate its consequences. Most (perhaps all) cases of moral responsibility for the outcomes of natural disasters are either cases of culpable negligence or cases of responsibility for the unintended or unforeseen side-effects of our actions or omissions.

In some cases the context provides us with salient normative expectations that can ground ascriptions of responsibility. Perhaps the simplest examples are situations in which an official did not perform her professional duties (or did not perform those duties in a way that can be reasonably expected) and thereby contributed to the negative outcomes of the disaster. Perhaps someone failed to perform routine-checks of early warning systems and the systems did not sound the alarm when the disaster struck. Or perhaps the officials responsible for evacuating the disaster zone failed to perform their task. In such situations we can base our ascriptions of moral responsibility on our ascriptions of culpable negligence, where the latter is defined in the context of professional duties or contractual obligations.

This reasoning can be extended to contexts where other types of normative expectations are salient. Many of us, for example, are aware of the fact that carbon emissions lead to human-induced global warming which in turn can increase the likelihood and severity of some types of disasters. We come to accept that such an increase in the likelihood and severity of disasters is a bad thing, and this results in a normative expectation on our part to lower our carbon footprint. Acting (or failing to act) in conflict with this normative expectation can then begin to be moralized. Here, the outcomes for which we are evaluated are likely to be side-effects of our other intentional behaviours, such as heating our homes or travelling to work. The knowledge condition is very important for this type of moral responsibility ascription. At least in some societies there now is an expectation that one should be aware of basic claims about the human contribution to climate change. Failure to possess this knowledge is beginning to be treated as culpability (e.g. Seibokaite, 2015 ). These normative considerations provide the “surrounding responsibility” within which it becomes possible to ascribe moral responsibility for the predictable side-effects of our actions and omissions. In a similar way, normative expectations can also arise from realizing that the current means of dealing with disasters sometimes favours privileged populations, creating additional disadvantages for already vulnerable populations. One such widely discussed issue is the fact that the floodwalls in lower Mississippi tend to be built in a way that directs floodwater away from the more affluent areas ( Steinberg, 2006 ). The more we learn about the side-effects of human activities, the more likely we are to encounter situations in which we can be expected to take these side-effects into account when acting.

Concluding remarks

If the considerations provided in this paper have some merit, we can conclude that sometimes human beings can be morally responsible for the outcomes of natural disasters and such responsibility ascriptions will most often be grounded in culpable negligence, including the culpable failure to prevent the side-effects of our actions or omissions. However, even if we come to accept that human beings can sometimes be morally responsible for the outcomes of natural disasters, in individual cases it can be very difficult to establish firm causal and conceptual links between human activities (either actions or omissions) and the outcomes of natural disasters. First, as already mentioned, human activities often constitute only a part of the causal process leading to the outcomes. Second, relevant human activities are often collective actions in which the contribution of a particular individual is very small—individual action is extremely unlikely to tip the scales (consider the contribution to global warming) ( Banks, 2013 ; Gilbert, 2006 ; Sinnott-Armstrong, 2010 ). Third, where the probability of a natural disaster occurring is sufficiently low, post hoc arguments to the effect that particular human agents had positive obligations to take preventive steps in order to mitigate the outcomes of the disaster cannot be easily produced. Fourth, the unpredictable and catastrophic nature of natural disasters makes it extremely difficult for an agent to foresee the potential outcomes of her activities. All these considerations suggest that it can be difficult to ascribe responsibility in individual cases. They do not show, however, that we can never be justified in doing this.

Normative expectations presuppose that the agent is in a position to know or predict the consequences of her actions. This information may often be unavailable to the agent. Nonetheless, science-backed information on disaster risks and disaster resilience is becoming more readily available (including via influential reports by such international bodies as the IPCC or UNISDR) and societal expectations that we should seek and act on this information are becoming more widespread. These expectations are currently even beginning to have large-scale societal effects. For example, partly in response to public pressure, university endowments, pension funds and various foundations have started shifting their capital out of greenhouse gas emission-intensive activities. The more prognostic power we gain, the greater our technological abilities to prevent or alleviate disasters, or deal with the outcomes of disasters. The more we know about the effects of human activities on processes occurring on Earth, the more difficult it is to hide behind our ignorance.

Acknowledgments

This paper resulted from my discussions with participants of COST Action IS1201 Disaster Bioethics . I would like to thank Dónal P. O’Mathüna, the participants of a workshop at Prešov University as well as two reviewers at Human Affairs for their insightful comments on an earlier manuscript. Funding for the workshop on moral theories and disasters at the University of Prešov, Slovakia (13-15 May 2015) and open-access publication was provided by COST Action IS1201 ( http://DisasterBioethics.eu ).

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Cause & Effect Essay: Natural Disasters and Their Causes

Natural disasters happen all over the world, and they can be utterly devastating for people’s lives and the environments in which they live. Although natural disasters are caused by nature and there is nothing that we can do to prevent them happening, there are many different natural causes that lead to natural disasters, and being aware of these causes enables us to be better prepared when such disasters do arrive.

One common natural disaster is flooding, which occurs when a river bursts its banks and the water spills out onto the floodplain. This is far more likely to happen when there is a great deal of heavy rain, so during very wet periods, flood warnings are often put in place. There are other risk factors for flooding too: steep-sided channels cause fast surface run-off, while a lack of vegetation or woodland to both break the flow of water and drink the water means that there is little to slow the floodwater down. Drainage basins of impermeable rock also cause the water to run faster over the surface.

Earthquakes are another common natural disaster that can cause many fatalities. The movements of the plates in the earth’s crust cause them. These plates do not always move smoothly and can get stuck, causing a build-up of pressure. It is when this pressure is released that an earthquake occurs. In turn, an earthquake under the water can also cause a tsunami, as the quake causes great waves by pushing large volumes of water to the surface.

Tsunamis can also be caused by underwater volcanic eruptions. Volcanic eruptions are another natural disaster, and they are caused by magma escaping from inside the earth. An explosion takes place, releasing the magma from a confined space, which is why there are often also huge quantities of gas and dust released during a volcanic eruption. The magma travels up the inside of the volcano, and pours out over the surrounding area as lava.

One of the most common natural disasters, but also one of the most commonly forgotten, is wildfires. These take place in many different countries all over the world, particularly during the summer months, and can be caused by a range of different things. Some of the things that can start the wildfires can be totally natural, while others can be manmade, but the speed at which they spread is entirely down to nature. The two natural causes of wildfires are the sun’s heat and lightning strikes, while they can also be caused by campfires, smoking, fireworks and many other things. The reasons that they spread so quickly are prolonged hot, dry weather, where the vegetation dries out, which is why they often take place in woodland.

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Natural and Human-Made Disasters

Ronald Waldman

• Historical Highlights of the Use of Field Epidemiology in Humanitarian Emergencies
• Role of Field Epidemiologists in Humanitarian Emergency Response
• Common Issues

Every year, approximately 400 natural disasters occur worldwide. Added to these are 30–40 armed conflicts ( 1 ). Together, these and other emergencies imperil the health of hundreds of millions of people and substantially increase levels of morbidity and mortality. The future may bring more calamity to more places around the world; climate change is a scientific certainty, and with it comes an increased level of dangerous weather events in all coastal areas around the globe.

Natural events and human-made emergencies (e.g., armed conflict; climate change; and “development disasters,” such as those ensuing from flooding upstream of dam construction or excessive damage from earthquakes where structures have not been built to code) frequently occur in relatively remote, difficult-to-reach locations, often in the poorer countries of the world that are least able to cope. The tasks of field epidemiologists who participate in response efforts include (1) accurately determining the number of people affected, (2) calculating rates of morbidity and mortality, (3) assessing the health-related needs of the population, (4) establishing priorities for providing health services, (5) monitoring progress toward rehabilitation and recovery, (6) evaluating the results of emergency interventions, and (7) improving future responses by communicating the consequences of these emergencies.

The approach to the way supplies and services are delivered to emergency-affected populations has changed radically during the past 50 years. The application of epidemiologic principles to emergency response is generally considered to have begun during the massive international relief effort mounted during the civil war in Nigeria during the late 1960s. During that war, which resulted in widespread starvation, massive internal displacement, and high rates of mortality, epidemiologists developed methods to help determine the health status of the affected populations so that appropriate assistance could be delivered ( 2 ). Nutritional surveillance evolved over subsequent years, and, by the late 1970s, internationally approved guidelines for measuring nutritional status had been developed ( 3 ).

Toward the end of the 1970s, the genocidal practices of the Khmer Rouge regime in Cambodia resulted in a massive exodus of survivors to Thailand, where hundreds of thousands of people were given refuge in several large camps. These so-called “death camps” quickly became the sites of numerous outbreaks of disease, but the extent and principal causes of morbidity and mortality were measured in quantifiable terms only when epidemiologists from the Center for Disease Control (later Centers for Disease Control and Prevention), working together with colleagues from the International Committee of the Red Cross and a group of nongovernmental organizations (NGOs), instituted a formal disease surveillance system and conducted methodologically sound surveys ( 4 ).

Before the regular use of field epidemiology techniques, emergency response was guided mainly by the best intentions of relatively inexperienced medical and surgical teams with inappropriate skills and inadequate logistical support. Doctors would build makeshift clinics, throw open the doors, and provide services to people who were able to access them—in most instances, only a small proportion of the affected population. Available services frequently did not match the public health needs of the population. Planners and managers were in the unenviable position of directing major relief operations with little information to guide their efforts ( 5 ). However, as sound epidemiologic practices emerged and were more regularly applied, reasonably accurate denominators on which to calculate rates of illness and death were generated and a more disciplined approach to the delivery of humanitarian assistance in the health sector evolved.

Unfortunately, disasters that have needed more honed epidemiologic approaches have continued to occur regularly. Examples include repeated famines and conflicts (the two are not unrelated) in the Horn of Africa; cyclones and tsunamis leading to massive flooding in countries bordering the Bay of Bengal and elsewhere in the Indian Ocean; earthquakes and hurricanes in the Caribbean and Central America; and wars in the Balkans, the Middle East, and Central Africa. All of these required distinct responses, but eventually, because of the development and application of epidemiologic techniques, including more formal approaches to rapid assessment, surveillance, and impact evaluation, patterns of morbidity and mortality emerged. In addition, training programs were established that resulted in an emergency response workforce that was more knowledgeable, more sophisticated, and more capable of reducing illness and saving more lives in less time ( Box 22.1 ) ( 6 ).

One notable watershed occurred in the wake of the Rwanda genocide of 1994, when more than 500,000 refugees fled that country to then-Zaire, with many settling in a few camps near the northern tip of Lake Kivu. Within weeks, an estimated 45,000 refugees had died of cholera, despite the presence of hundreds of nongovernmental organizations, United Nations agencies, military medical contingents from at least nine Western countries, and many other public health officials ( 7 ). The collective failure to respond effectively to this situation clearly underscored the need for the emergency relief community to develop indicators for a successful intervention and to work to achieve those indicators in every emergency. This need led to development of the Sphere Project and its accompanying Handbook ( Humanitarian Charter and Minimum Standards in Humanitarian Response ) that remains obligatory reading for persons working in this field (8). In addition to establishing standards in key areas (shelter, food security, food aid and nutrition, water and sanitation, and health services, and the cross-cutting areas of gender and protection), the Sphere Project has provided opportunities for epidemiologists and other public health experts to agree on a relatively standardized approach to emergency relief. A fourth edition of this essential Handbook will be published in Fall, 2018.

More recently, notable humanitarian crises resulting from natural disasters have included a massive earthquake in Haiti (2010); flooding that displaced 20 million people in Pakistan (2010); several typhoons in the Philippines, including Typhoon Haiyan/Yolanda in 2013; and the ongoing (2017) severe drought in the Horn of Africa. Human-made emergencies commanding the attention of the international humanitarian community have included ongoing conflicts in South Sudan, Central African Republic, and throughout the Middle East. Although the peer-reviewed literature addressing responses to such disasters remains relatively sparse, field epidemiologists preparing to respond to future crises should be encouraged to learn from these case studies.

The principal objectives of epidemiologic field investigations and response in emergency settings are to

• Establish the magnitude and distribution of the public health consequences of the event.
• Assess the size and health needs of the affected population.
• Help provide and promote epidemiologically derived data as the principal basis for resource allocation.
• Help guide implementation of public health programs to minimize postemergency morbidity and mortality.
• Monitor progress of the relief effort.
• Evaluate the effectiveness of the relief effort.

The field epidemiologist is a core member of the emergency response team. Increasingly, the international response to emergencies is organized in a command-and-control manner, in accordance with the Incident Command System (see Chapter 16 ) or similar systems approaches ( 9 ). Knowledge of the organizational structure of the relief effort and identification of the decision-makers is important, as are being a team player and understanding the roles of other team members. In the face of tragedy, many unseasoned hands will adopt an “act first– think later” approach and view the methodical collection and analysis of data as a frivolous, time-wasting activity. In these instances, the field epidemiologist must be an affirmative voice of reason—strongly advancing an evidence-based approach to health interventions that maximizes benefit to the affected population.

Although no cookbook approach exists to emergency response, flexibility and sound judgment are hallmarks for the successful use of field epidemiology. Accordingly, a flexible framework of steps for the epidemiologist includes

• Determining the impact of the event on the public’s health by establishing rates of illness and death with an optimal attainable level of accuracy (note: “the perfect should not be the enemy of the good”). In doing so, it is, of course, essential to focus on the determinations of both numerators (cases and deaths) and denominators (total population and, wherever possible, age and sex breakdowns).
• Initiating disease surveillance as quickly as possible, beginning with a minimum amount of data to collect and augmenting as deemed appropriate and feasible.
• Identifying personal, household, and environmental risk factors for elevated rates of illness and death.
• Advocating for the early initiation of essential public health interventions and disease-control programs on the basis of knowledge of the actual and potential distribution of diseases in the population.
• Arguing forcefully that health actions of lesser priority be deferred.
• Becoming an essential member of the health response team by attending appropriate meetings; working with public health officials and other responders from different organizations, including government officials; and providing frequently updated reports about the situation to those who have a need to know.

This last point (i.e., providing situation reports) is critical; in emergency response, “consequential epidemiology” needs to be practiced ( 10 ). The contribution of epidemiologists reflects their ability to provide timely and accurate data in a way that decision-makers can easily understand, analyze, and use for action. The use of those data should enable effective implementation of appropriate public health measures. Conversely, collecting and providing potentially useful information that decision-makers do not act on might be viewed, in part, as a failure of field epidemiology, as is the implementation of health interventions that relevant data do not support. Thus, epidemiologic skills are necessary but not sufficient: equally critical are the abilities to communicate effectively, advocate successfully, and provide strong leadership in support of the policymakers directly responsible for consequential actions.

In its early stages, the emergency relief environment is always chaotic. However, every responder has the same essential needs: food, water, shelter, transportation, communication, and a place to sleep. Thus, the field epidemiologist’s first priority is to arrange to meet these basic needs. This is important because the more independent one can be, the less others will have to divert attention from their work to provide assistance.

Hiring staff is another early priority, especially in international emergency relief. Because field epidemiology is a population-based discipline, the epidemiology team should include members who know the local language, geography, and customs. Therefore, recruiting and retaining people who can be relied on to be effective liaisons with the local communities is a high priority. Although English-speaking translators are highly valued, because they do not always represent the community and are unlikely to be professionally trained, information they provide should be carefully assessed and verified.

Establishing Rates of Illness, Injury, and Death

In most emergency relief settings, accurate measurement of the size of the affected population and its current health status is missing and difficult to establish. For the field epidemiologist, though, it is critical to determine a reasonably precise denominator on which to base the calculation of rates, such as crude, age-, sex-, and disease-specific death; prevalence of moderate, severe, and global acute malnutrition in the affected community; incidence of high-priority conditions; and access to use of health services. Determining rates is essential for comparing population groups and prioritizing public health interventions. A variety of methodologic options can be used to calculate population size, ranging from the more basic, such as extrapolating from the number of people in a sample of dwelling units, to the more sophisticated, such as using aerial photography and/or satellite imagery. The field epidemiologist needs to consider the context in which the relief effort is occurring to select the best method—one that provides reasonably accurate numbers in a culturally and contextually sensitive way.

Rapid Assessment

In 1980, in one of the many emergencies on the Horn of Africa, women were observed to be wearing no jewelry, a sign that all valuables had been sold to purchase food that had become available at exorbitant prices. There was one exception, however: almost all women wore a thin string around their necks with a small, spoon-shaped pendant attached to it. The significance of this oddity eluded field epidemiologists assessing the health status of the population until a visiting ophthalmologist mentioned that this population suffered from an unusually high prevalence of trachoma. The spoon-shaped device, it was learned, was used to remove inverted eyelashes, an action that helped relieve the irritation and pain associated with the scratched and ulcerated cornea that are a feature of this disease. Their ubiquity was a testament to the importance of the disease—and keen observation was the key to diagnosing this public health problem.

__________ Source: R. Waldman, unpublished data.

Field epidemiologists play a key role in the earliest stages of any relief effort. In addition to an appreciation for quantifiable data and for how and when to collect it, the “shoe leather” component of epidemiology is valuable in and of itself for conducting an initial rapid assessment. A wealth of information can be gleaned from observation during a walk-through of the affected area if one knows what to look for and how to employ basic qualitative techniques.

• If commodities are being sold or traded in the marketplace, then their price, compared with preemergency prices, indicates their availability or scarcity.
• Black markets spring up quickly in postdisaster settings, and the willingness of people to make major sacrifices to pay for essential commodities indicates dire need.
• Indicators such as the amount of and type of jewelry being worn can be meaningful ( Box 22.2 ). The absence of traditional adornment in a society in which it is customary might signify food insecurity and that everything of value already has been sold.

Interviews with community leaders, transect walks through affected areas, and results from a constellation of methods that frequently are grouped as participatory rapid appraisals can be useful even before the analysis of survey data that might provide more accurate information but at the cost of timeliness. Of paramount importance for the field epidemiologist is reaching the disaster location as quickly as possible, visiting all affected areas and population groups, and helping the relief community gather, collate, and assess the value of all information. Postemergency settings are dynamic, but ultimately decisions about public health and health service delivery must be made from day 1 on the basis of existing evidence ( 11 ).

As valuable as nonquantitative data might be, the lack of routinely collected health information means that, as soon as is feasible, surveys will need to be conducted. A precise sampling frame will be difficult to establish at first, and careful judgment is needed to ensure that samples drawn from the population are representative. However, in most circumstances, a less than optimally representative systematically chosen sample will be superior to a convenience sample, especially if the results are to guide the equitable distribution of commodities and services.

A commonly used survey method is two-stage cluster sampling , first developed by the World Health Organization to measure vaccination coverage rates ( 12 ). The logistical demands of this method are far less than for either simple random sampling or systematic random sampling because relatively few clusters need to be visited to obtain statistically valid results with a reasonable degree of precision. Although sample sizes can be relatively large, the advantages of using this method usually outweigh the disadvantages. Nonetheless, two distinct disadvantages should be noted:

• Cluster sampling is not well suited for measuring characteristics that are not homogenously distributed in the population. For example, if malnutrition is clumped in certain areas, then cluster sampling might miss it entirely or, conversely, overidentify it, resulting in skewed, nonrepresentative values for the population as a whole.
• Cluster sampling can be difficult to explain to decision-makers.

Finally, a frequently overlooked problem with surveys is that nonsampling error is likely to be more important than the disadvantages of any sampling method. Surveyors need to be carefully trained to understand the objectives of the survey and the importance of collecting accurate and unbiased information. When people affected by an emergency have lost their possessions or suffered other shocks, they can be eager to please those they perceive to be in a position to help them by providing answers they think the surveyors want to hear, resulting in a sincere, but inaccurate, picture of reality. For example, people might not report household deaths because they fear having their rations decreased. Therefore, the field epidemiologist needs to be aware of the many real and potential biases in obtaining accurate information from an emergency-affected population and must take steps to ensure that none of the epidemiologic activities inadvertently contributes to further deterioration of the situation. For epidemiologists, as for clinicians, “do no harm” is an important rule.

Organizing Priority Interventions

The main goals of emergency relief are to save lives and restore individuals and communities to their preemergency conditions. Although individual-and population-directed health interventions are important in many settings, other types of interventions might take precedence. In the book, Refugee Health , the medical relief organization Doctors Without Borders suggested 10 top priorities in disaster response ( 13 ). Of the top five, only one—measles vaccination—is a health-specific intervention, and its importance might have diminished since publication of that book as more countries have achieved high measles vaccine coverage rates through routine health services. (In situations of protracted conflict, however, where primary healthcare services have been unavailable to the population for some time, vaccination coverage levels can fall dramatically. As a result, measles outbreaks have occurred increasingly throughout the Middle East and in migrant populations in Europe.) The other priorities are initial assessment; water and sanitation; food and nutrition; and shelter and site planning. Although these are clearly related to public health, in most international emergency responses they are considered to be distinct from the health sector.

Some humanitarian interventions address basic needs of the emergency-affected population slowly and even inadequately. For example, in the area of nutrition, field epidemiologists have been called on to identify, diagnose, and design appropriate interventions for rare conditions (e.g., scurvy, pellagra, and beriberi) while simultaneously implementing surveillance for acute moderate and severe malnutrition. Although relief team members who are experts on specific problems understandably will focus on those problems, the field epidemiologist needs to address the overall spectrum of the relief effort and promote the most appropriate interventions, regardless of the sectors to which the interventions might belong.

Public health surveillance is a critical element of disaster response, and its establishment usually becomes the responsibility of the on-site epidemiology team. In humanitarian settings, epidemiologists attempting to implement effective surveillance might have to address several challenges, including

• Balancing speed and accuracy in adverse conditions.
• Integrating multiple sources of sometimes conflicting data while determining which are credible and which are not.
• Soliciting others to participate in the surveillance effort when they might not assign it the same priority the epidemiologist does.
• Assisting decision-makers in using surveillance data to take action.

Rapidly established, well-monitored, and widely used surveillance systems have been instrumental in preventing deaths as, for example, in the aftermath of the Asian tsunami of December 1994, when on-scene, experienced epidemiologists helped conduct effective surveillance.

Conditions targeted for surveillance vary in relation to specifics of the setting. In most developing countries, at the start it may be sufficient to target a simple surveillance system toward syndromic presentations and easily recognizable conditions, such as acute lower respiratory illness (a proxy for pneumonia), acute watery or bloody diarrhea (cholera, dysentery), fever with or without stiff neck (malaria, meningitis), and measles. In other settings—especially in middle-and higher income countries—the focus might be on measuring the needs of chronically ill persons who might be cut off from their medications or procedures; in these situations, such conditions might be more prevalent than common acute communicable diseases. In all settings, surveillance should focus on the most vulnerable segments of the population (e.g., infants, children, older persons, women, destitute and underserved persons, and persons with special needs). To ensure they are not neglected, epidemiologists should disaggregate data to facilitate identification of health problems in these groups.

Coordination

Emergency relief almost always occurs in emotionally charged environments. Although the need for highly coordinated action is universally recognized (some have suggested that “poor coordination” should be recorded as a cause of death on death certificates), many responders might want to coordinate but not “be coordinated.” The most common scenario is for a health cluster to be established at the onset of the relief effort. Government officials, representatives of the World Health Organization, and a designated person from a nongovernment organization usually are assigned joint responsibility for chairing cluster meetings and overseeing their functioning. In large disasters, such as the Haiti earthquake of 2010, several hundred responders regularly attended health cluster meetings, many seeking guidance on how to respond effectively ( 14 ).

The epidemiologist, for better or for worse, frequently is thrust into a position of responsibility and authority because most responders will not be familiar with the published medical and/or public health literature and few will be able to view the chaos through the objective lens of unbiased data. Epidemiologists responding to an emergency for the first time might be unfamiliar and even uncomfortable with the amount of respect they are accorded.

Humanitarian response settings are the emergency rooms of public health. Lifesaving, irreversible decisions frequently are made in the early phases of the relief effort. A fundamental task of the field epidemiologist is collection and circulation of essential data on the health and nutritional status of the affected population as accurately as possible in the shortest possible time. The purpose of these data is to help first responders prioritize the interventions most likely to limit excess preventable death. The environment is often chaotic, uncoordinated, and characterized by logistical and resource constraints, but the epidemiologist needs to be calm, assertive, and able to convey the power of accurately collected and analyzed data. Ultimately, however, successful contribution to a disaster response will be measured not on the basis of the elegance of the epidemiologic investigations, but rather as a function of how many lives are saved ( 15 ).

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• Publications

5 Reasons Why Disasters are Not Natural

Disasters are often perceived as acts of nature, unavoidable and inevitable. However, this is far from the truth.

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Here are five reasons that challenge the notion of disasters as natural occurrences.

Humans have an influence on disaster impacts

Contrary to popular belief, natural hazards alone do not result in disasters. When they intersect with human activities and vulnerable assets, these hazards turn into catastrophic events. The United Nations Office for Disaster Risk Reduction (UNDRR) emphasizes that human actions such as deforestation, urbanization and inadequate infrastructure worsen the impacts of events like floods, earthquakes and storms. For instance, building in flood-prone areas increases the vulnerability to floods, transforming a manageable hazard into a possible devastating disaster for communities settled close to rivers.

Social vulnerability influences communities’ resilience to natural hazards

Disasters do not affect all communities evenly, with social vulnerability – shaped by poverty, inequality and marginalization – playing a crucial role in determining resilience to natural hazards. Marginalized groups often bear the brunt of disasters due to limited access to resources and information. They are often forced to settle in the least advantaged locations as those might be the only available or affordable ones.  For instance, the Interconnected Disaster Risks report 2021/2022 highlights how after the 2021 earthquake in Haiti, impacts like the loss of life and devastation were worsened by inadequate housing conditions and widespread poverty, underscoring the role of social vulnerability in shaping disaster outcomes.

Climate change intensifies disaster risks

The escalating impacts of climate change further blur the line between natural hazards and human-induced disasters. Climate variability, increasing temperatures, shifting precipitation patterns and rising sea levels contribute to the frequency and intensity of extreme weather events. For example, hurricane Ida, that dumped record rainfall on New York in 2021 and caused over $75 billion in damages, was made more intense by warm ocean waters. By acknowledging the role of human-induced climate change, policymakers can better prioritize adaptation and mitigation efforts to reduce disaster risk.

The most vulnerable are often most at risk from disasters

People’s jobs, incomes or access to social protection benefits like insurance can help to prepare for, cope with and recover from disasters. Without, one is left vulnerable and at risk, such as those living in informal urban settlements.  Recognizing their losses and damages when disasters strike, including by giving them access to the recently established Loss & Damage Fund, could lower their risk levels.

Just as human actions can cause disasters, they can also prevent them

Ultimately, disasters do not occur in isolation from human influence. The decisions and behaviours of individuals and societies significantly shape the magnitude and impact of hazards. Rather than despair, this is a cause for hope. By changing our behaviours and actions, we can directly make a positive influence to prevent hazards from turning into disasters or minimize disaster impacts.  Understanding why disasters occur in the first place helps in creating strategies to address their root causes and identifying long-term solutions.

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Individual and community behavioral responses to natural disasters

• Original Paper
• Published: 28 October 2020
• Volume 105 , pages 1541–1569, ( 2021 )

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• Claude Berrebi   ORCID: orcid.org/0000-0002-1350-5062 1 ,
• Ariel Karlinsky 2 , 3 &
• Hanan Yonah 1  

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How do people and communities respond to catastrophes? A natural disaster is a type of external, quasi-random and unexpected catastrophic shock that generates psychological, social and economic implications. Using detailed county level administrative data of charitable contributions, crime and natural hazards in the USA in the recent decade, we empirically identify and quantify the causal effect of natural disasters on prosocial and antisocial behavioral reactions. Our main finding is that while monetary contributions decline in the local affected community in the aftermath of natural disasters, the neighboring and more distant communities react by increasing their charitable giving. Additionally, we find that in the affected community, natural disasters effect crime negatively, dispelling popular conceptions regarding looting, and that while federal assistance crowds out charitable contributions, it does not change the residents reaction to natural disasters.

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A traumatic event is defined by its capacity to evoke terror, fear, helplessness or horror in the face of a threat to life or a serious injury (American Psychiatric Association, 1994. Diagnostic and statistical manual of mental disorders (4th ed.). Washington, DC).

In certain cases, the deterioration of wealth and its effect on the affected community is so great as to yield a decrease in charity within the community affected (De Alessi 1967 ).

We refer to philanthropic donations as monetary donations to qualified organizations in the USA by individuals who itemize deductions.

The classic economic theory would suggest that shortage in supply of goods would lead to an increase in prices, given demand remains the same.

In this study, our specifications rely on reduced form models. Such models do not allow to pinpoint the exact underlying mechanisms at play, and therefore, several possible mechanisms remain partially or entirely plausible.

Loayza et al. ( 2012 ) argue this notion. They conclude that disasters do affect economic growth, but not always negatively, with effects that differ across types of disasters, economic sectors and developing and developed countries. A meta-analyses study by Lazzaroni and Bergeijk ( 2014 ) indicates that disasters have a negative impact in average in terms of direct costs.

Nonprofits’ net assets and revenue found to be positively correlated with disaster event damage levels.

https://www.irs.gov/statistics/soi-tax-stats-individual-income-tax-statistics-zip-code-data-soi .

We followed SOI’s recommendations and instructions to aggregate the data to the county level.

In 2015, total charitable contributions by individuals and households were estimated at $264.58 billion, 82% of which was itemized (Giving USA 2016 ). Any interpretation of our findings should be limited to those individuals who itemize deductions.

Form 1040, Schedule A.

https://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/stormevents/ .

All monetary variables are indexed by the CPI to 2015 dollars.

A contemporaneous model was estimated as well, yielding qualitatively similar results, and is available upon request from the authors.

This approach is practical as more than 95% of counties are located at a distance of up to 3000 km from each other.

As our data are aggregated at the county level, one should be careful extrapolating our findings on the individual level.

This is an approximation, as each county is also the neighbor of its neighbors. The spatial econometrics literature shows that our approach is a reasonable approximation (Elhorst 2014 ).

This does not mean that counties with higher share of college graduates contribute less. It is rather more likely that our fixed effect model is not suitable for testing variables with relatively low within county variation. For a detailed discussion, see section 1 of the online appendix.

For example, an ecological fallacy could occur if highly educated individuals increase their donations, but at the same time, counties with a higher share of highly educated people also tend to suffer from more severe economic downturn than those with lower education pulling the average contribution down. If that were the case the decrease in contributions in these counties should not be attributed to the highly educated individuals.

Much like the cautionary note following the education variable discussion. This analysis does not suggest that republican counties contribute the same amount. It is rather more likely that our fixed effect model is not suitable for testing variables with relatively low within county variation. For a detailed discussion, see section 1 of the online appendix.

Violent crimes include murder, rape, robbery and aggravated assault. Property crime includes burglary, larceny and motor vehicle thefts.

Column 2 does not include a separate coefficient for income inequality as the data are only available for a limited number of time periods. Consequently, the variation of this variable within counties is very low (SD = 1.25) compared to the variation between counties (SD = 3.16). We therefore chose to use the level of this variable in 2014 as a measure of each county’s income inequality. Thus, in our analysis, this variable is time-invariant, and is collinear with the county fixed effects.

There is no coefficient for the religious diversity index as there is no temporal variation at the county level, and the data were collected only for 2010. The variable is thus time-invariant and collinear with the county fixed effects.

The religious groups are: Catholics, Eastern Orthodox Christians, Eastern Religions (Buddhism, Hinduism, etc.), Jews, Mormons, Muslims, Protestants and others.

Due to lack of temporal variation in our religiosity variables, we are unable to test the mechanism that natural disasters affect charitable contributions by their effect on religiosity.

For example, can the private sector replace government support to charities (Khanna and Todd 1998 ).

Formally, a governor must first request a declaration, and the president may grant or deny it.

https://www.sba.gov/about-sba/sba-performance/open-government/digital-sba/open-data/open-data-sources .

When models 1 and 2 are estimated with the number of victims of natural disasters instead of number of events, the federal assistance coefficients remain virtually identical. The results are available upon request.

One should be careful interpreting this finding as a relationship between natural disasters and charitable giving on the individual level, since the data are aggregated on the county level and is subject to “ecological Fallacy” risk.

Unlike the monetary data which were retrieved from administrative datasets, volunteering data are based on surveys and questionnaires and therefore may be subject to a survey bias.

http://www.irdrinternational.org/2014/03/28/irdr-peril-classification-and-hazard-glossary/ .

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Acknowledgements

We thank our colleagues at the Hebrew University’s School of Public Policy and Economics Department for their useful discussions and feedback. We also thank the participants of the Lilly Family School of Philanthropy at Indiana University seminars for useful comments and suggestions. Claude Berrebi is grateful for the warm hospitality of the Princeton School of Public and International Affairs (SPIA) and Princeton’s Empirical Studies of Conflict Project (ESOC) at Princeton University while he was working on this research.

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Berrebi, C., Karlinsky, A. & Yonah, H. Individual and community behavioral responses to natural disasters. Nat Hazards 105 , 1541–1569 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11069-020-04365-2

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Natural Disasters, Human Rights, and the Role of National Human Rights Institutions

Subscribe to this week in foreign policy, elizabeth ferris elizabeth ferris former brookings expert, research professor, institute for the study of international migration - georgetown university @beth_ferris.

October 25, 2008

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In my presentation this morning, I would like to build on the remarks of Walter Kälin on the human rights of IDPs to focus specifically on human rights in natural disasters. I will then talk about the particular role which NHRIs can play: before a disaster hits, during a disaster and in the period of recovery and reconstruction.

Natural Disasters

A natural disaster is defined by the UN as: “the consequences of events triggered by natural hazards that overwhelm local response capacity and seriously affect the social and economic development of a region.” In other words, if an earthquake takes place on an uninhabited island and no one is affected, it is not a natural disaster. In order to be a disaster, people must be affected. Similarly, if flooding takes place in an area where there is adequate preparation, it probably isn’t a natural disaster. If a similar level of flooding, however, takes place in an area where there isn’t preparation and crops are ruined and people are forced to abandon their homes, it then can be a natural disaster. Similarly, heavy rainfalls occur in many parts of the world. Normally, they are not natural disasters, but when the rainfall is heavier than usual and when precautions have not been taken, a natural disaster can result. The rainfall itself is not the disaster, but rather the consequences of the rainfall.

There are two additional aspects of natural disasters that need to be explored before engaging in discussion of human rights and natural disasters.

First, just how ‘natural’ are ‘natural disasters?’ The distinction if often made between natural disasters – such as flooding – and man-made disasters, such as an oil spill or chemical accident. But often the consequences of natural disasters are worse because of human involvement. To use two examples from my own country: in the 1930s, terrible dust storms in the middle of the United States devastated the lives of inhabitants. For year after year, there was little rainfall, and the topsoil of a major area of the country simply blew away, leaving a swathe of desert. While the lack of rainfall was a natural phenomenon, the fact that a period of intense settlement had converted enormous grasslands into wheat fields and that farmers had plowed up the earth, exposing the soil to the wind was directly responsible for the disaster. If the farmers hadn’t settled in the region, if they hadn’t plowed up the ground, there would not have been a natural disaster. [1] A second more recent example is Hurricane Katrina which displaced over a million people in New Orleans and the Gulf coast in 2005. While the hurricane was a natural phenomenon, the fact that the Louisiana wetlands had been destroyed by developers in past decades eliminated a natural barrier for the hurricane. Without the wetlands, the Hurricane moved in full force to populated areas, thus causing the disaster. In other words, human actions frequently turn natural weather events into disaster. On this continent, there are many stories of drought which led to famine and disaster, e.g. Ethiopia in 1984-85, where the famine was a least partly the result of government policies. In fact, Amartya Sen has argued that democracies never experience famine because the political pressures force governments to take actions to prevent droughts or other calamities that would otherwise lead to famine. [2]

A second aspect of natural disasters concerns the speed at which they occur. A rapid-onset disaster includes earthquakes, flooding, hurricanes, cyclones, etc. Slow-onset disasters, particularly droughts, develop over a period of time. This gives more time for precautions to be undertaken and for governments and the international community to mitigate the effects of a change in climate. In Southern Africa in 1992 where terrible drought occurred, famine was averted because of policies undertaken by governments in the region and by the international community.

It is generally easier to mobilize international support for sudden-onset disasters; in disasters with high media coverage, there is usually an outpouring of support which is not usually manifest for slow-onset disasters. The outpouring of support for the victims of the 2004 tsunamis, for example, dwarfed the response to victims of flooding in Bangladesh earlier in the year.

Climate Change and Natural Disasters

There has been a lot of speculation about the potential impact of climate change on displacement and some of the speculation is not based on hard evidence. What seems fairly clear, however, is that climate change is likely to increase both the frequency and the severity of natural disasters. It is also likely that global warming will result in sea level rises which may displace people living in low-lying coastal areas or on small islands. There are also predictions that climate change will produce changes in weather patterns which will increase slow-onset disasters, particularly droughts in some regions, including Africa.

Human Rights and Natural Disasters

The International Strategy for Disaster Risk Reduction estimates that 200 million people have been affected by natural disasters every year for the past two decades. [3] In the course of the past year, over 400 natural disasters took 16,000 lives, affected close to 250 million people and displaced many millions.

Most people who are displaced by natural disasters remain within the borders of their country. They are internally displaced persons (IDPs) as defined in the Guiding Principles on Internal Displacement and thus entitled to the full range of rights and responsibilities included therein. As with people displaced by conflict, it is their national governments who are responsible for protecting and assisting them and with facilitating durable solutions for their displacement.

We know that poverty and marginalization makes things worse for victims of natural disasters. Natural disasters in poorer countries have higher casualties than disasters of similar magnitude in wealthier countries. Within countries, it is often the marginalized groups who suffer disproportionately. In Colombia and the Philippines, for example, it is usually poorer, marginalized groups who live on the slopes of volcanoes. People with more resources choose to live elsewhere. And so, when the volcanoes erupt, it is the poor who suffer disproportionately. In Central America and Brazil, it is the poor who live in shantytowns on the hills surrounding major cities – hills which are susceptible to mudslides at times of heavy rain. We know that women are more likely to die in floods by a factor of 3 or 4 to 1 than men. Children, the elderly, the disabled and the sick are also more likely to suffer as a result of natural disasters.

In the aftermath of the 2004 tsunami, there was recognition that disaster response involves more than delivery of humanitarian assistance. Growing recognition of the need to respect, uphold, and promote the human rights of those affected by natural disasters, whether displaced or not, was the driving force between efforts by the RSG to develop Operational Guidelines for Human Rights and Natural Disaster. These guidelines, which were formally adopted by the InterAgency Standing Committee in June 2006, are presently being used to train disaster responders on ways of ensuring that human rights are protected in the midst of disaster. [4]

The problems that are often encountered by persons affected by the consequences of natural disasters include: unequal access to assistance; discrimination in aid provision; enforced relocation; sexual and gender-based violence; loss of documentation; recruitment of children into fighting forces; unsafe or involuntary return or resettlement; and issues of property restitution. [5]

The Guidelines suggest a human rights approach to planning both the initial emergency and longer-term response. People do not lose their basic human rights as a result of a natural disaster or their displacement. Rather all of those affected by natural disasters, including those who are displaced, are entitled to the protection of all relevant human rights guarantees. As residents, and usually citizens of the country in which they are living, they are entitled to the protections afforded to all residents and citizens even though they may have particular needs related to the disaster and thus require specific assistance and protection measures.

As with all situations of internal displacement, the primary duty and responsibility to provide such protection and assistance lies with the national authorities of the affected countries. Those affected by natural disasters have the right to request and receive such protection and assistance from their governments.

The Operational Guidelines stress that human rights encompass not only civil and political rights but also economic, social and cultural rights. However, in the midst of a disaster, it is often difficult to simultaneously promote all rights for all of those affected. Thus for practical reasons, the Operational Guidelines divide human rights into four groups, namely:

• rights related to physical security and integrity (e.g. protection of the right to life and the right to be free of assault, rape, arbitrary detention, kidnapping, and threats to these rights);
• rights related to basic necessities of life (e.g. the rights to food, drinking water, shelter, adequate clothing, adequate health services, and sanitation);
• rights related to other economic, social and cultural protection needs (e.g. the rights to be provided with or have access to education, to receive restitution or compensation for lost property, and to work); and
• rights related to other civil and political protection needs (e.g. the rights to religious freedom and freedom of speech, personal documentation, political participation, access to courts, and freedom from discrimination).

The Operational Guidelines suggest that the first two groups of rights may be the most relevant during the emergency, life-saving phase. Thus in the initial disaster response, it is usually more important to ensure adequate access to water than to provide replacement identity cards to those who have been displaced. However, the guidelines insist that only the full respect of all four groups of rights can ensure adequate protection of the human rights of those affected by natural disasters, including of those who are displaced. [6]

The guidelines go on to state that “in all cases States have an obligation to respect, protect and to fulfill the human rights of their citizens and of any other persons in their territory or under their jurisdiction.” [7] States thus have a responsibility: to prevent violations of these rights from occurring or re-occurring; to stop them when they do occur, and to ensure reparation and full rehabilitation if a violation has happened.

When governments are unwilling or unable to fulfill these responsibilities, the international community needs to support and supplement the efforts of the government and local authorities. And these organizations as well – UN agencies, international and national non-governmental organizations, civil society, and IDP communities themselves – have a responsibility to ensure that their approaches and programs incorporate a human rights focus.

In fact, most often, rights are violated not because of conscious intention but because of the lack of awareness or planning based on a rights-based approach. Thus in the United States, the evacuation plans for New Orleans in 2005 were based on private vehicles – even though there were racial and class differences in vehicle ownership. While most middle class white people had access to private cars, many poor and African-American residents did not. [8] More recently, in the evacuation of New Orleans prior to Hurricane Gustav in August 2008, it was clear that officials had still not heeded the lessons learned from Katrina. While evacuation plans provided bus transportation for those without cars, displaced New Orleans residents were taken by bus to large communal shelters while those who evacuated by car were directed to churches, private homes and hotels. [9]

Experience has shown while patterns of discrimination emerge during the initial emergency response phase, the longer that displacement lasts, the greater the risk of human rights violations.

The Brookings-Bern Project on Internal Displacement developed a manual on the Operational Guidelines to provide more concrete guidance to disaster responders and this manual is currently being revised in light of experiences in the field. Presently both Brookings and the Protection Cluster Working Group are organizing training sessions for government officials responsible for disaster response as well as non-governmental organizations. Such training is necessary in order to ensure that a rights-based approach to disaster response is incorporated into all phases of operations.

Natural Disasters, Human Rights and the Role of NHRIs

National Human Rights Institutions are well-placed to play a role in upholding human rights standards for those affected by natural disasters. Last year, some of you participated in a session lead by Joyce Leader who was working with us, to explore some of the ways that NHRIs can become involved in monitoring displacement. I’d like to share with you some of the experiences of NHRIs in another part of the world – Asia – to see if their experiences could be helpful to you in Africa. At its meeting in September 2001, the Asia Pacific Forum of National Human Rights Institutions expressed interest in developing their capacity to promote and respect the human rights of IDPs. In March 2005, following the December 2004 tsunamis, the NHRIs met again and agreed on the need to develop a common methodology for their role with regard to IDPs in the context of natural disasters. In August 2005, the members of the Asia Pacific Forum welcomed draft guidelines which were not introduced as binding instruments, but rather as good practices which might be useful to NHRIs experiencing natural disasters.

I’d like to share some of these guidelines with you.

Strengthening NHRI capacity:

There are many strategies to strengthen NHRIs’ capacities. Immediate strategies consist of appointing an IDP focal point, establishing links with regional areas, training and providing relevant documents about human rights issues faced by IDPs to staff member and integrating local legal and IDP experts. During an emergency response to a natural disaster, NHRIs should develop a comprehensive approach to the promotion and protection of human rights and establish short team offices in the affected areas. After the immediate effects of the disaster subside, NHRIs should establish a strategy to address IDP concerns with all relevant sections of the NHRI.

Working with government:

In order for NHRIs to work effectively with the government during a disaster, before a disaster takes place NHRIs should disseminate the Guiding Principles to government agencies, advocate for the ratification of all relevant international human rights and humanitarian instruments and identify gaps in the laws and recommend reforms. While there is an emergency response, organize a public hearing, ensure the government has a rights-based approach to the provision of aid and work with the government to ensure they reissue identity papers and other documents. In the long term NHRIs must encourage the government to develop an effective rights-based policy, meet with government agencies engaged in work with IDPs to gather accurate information, and recommend that the government establish a formal taskforce to share information.

Working with UN, civil society and other non-state actors:

Communication with the UN, civil society and other non-state actors should begin before a natural disaster takes place. While working with these groups it is essential to disseminate the Guiding Principles, advise on the risks to the human rights of IDPs and seek advice from the UN and other relevant actors. During an emergency response, NHRIs must ensure the participation of IDPs in all processes and engage both state and non-state actors about the risks face by IDPs. After a disaster NHRIs must monitor the state of IDPs, contribute to UN monitoring mechanisms and help with rehabilitation, compensation and reconstruction for IDPs.

Awareness-raising:

To increase awareness among local populations the Guiding Principles should be translated into all relevant languages and dialects and distributed. During a natural disaster it is imperative to develop a public information strategy to raise awareness for human rights issues for IDPs, as well as go to the affected areas to meet with IDPs, international and national NGOs and the government to determine the effects of the disaster. There are many different long term projects that NHRIs can take part in to increase awareness including, providing and disseminating on-going coverage of human rights issues caused by natural disasters, integrating the human rights implications of internal displacement into training, participating in international conferences, workshops, and seminars, and stressing the need for a rights-based approach to humanitarian assistance.

Complaint handling:

In order to effectively handle complaints during a natural disaster, NHRIs must establish relationships with all complaint hearing mechanisms in various communities and ensure that these complaint hearing mechanisms have the flexibility to function throughout an emergency. In an emergency response it is important for NHRIs to publicize complaint handling functions to the IDP population and help seek out complaints from the IDP population. In the long term, NHRIs should take part in court proceedings and advocate for the prosecution of individuals that violate human rights.

Regional Cooperation:

Internal displacement is not only an issue internal to a country but the entire region. Cooperation between NHRIs should be multilateral through information sharing and the organization of seminars and workshops.

For discussion:

• To what extent do these guidelines, developed in Asia, make sense for Africa?
• What do you see as the main barriers to your more effective engagement with IDPs and with Natural Disasters?

National Human Rights Institutions are uniquely placed to play a role in ensuring that the human rights of those affected by natural disasters are promoted. You have the expertise in human rights principles and the mandate to protect human rights. You are rooted in your own local and national context and thus may have a better view of what is needed and what is possible than international actors. While specific national contexts vary and different kinds of disasters require different responses, the need to uphold human rights in emergency situations seems to be a constant. We look forward to hearing from you about the kinds of natural disasters you have lived through and your views on possible actions which you could take to ensure that the human rights of the victims of natural disasters are upheld.

[1] Timothy Egan, The Worst Hard Time: the Untold Story of those who survived the Great American Dust Bowl , Mariner Books, 2006.

[2] Amartya Sen, Poverty and Famines: An Essay on Entitlement and Deprivation , Oxford University Press, 1983. Michael Massing, “Does Democracy Avoid Famine?” New York Times, March 1, 2003.

[3] http://www.unisdr.org/

[4] IASC, Operational Guidelines, op.cit.

[5] IASC Operational Guidelines on Human Rights and Natural Disasters , Washington: Brookings-Bern Project on Internal Displacement, June 2006, p. 8.

[6] IASC, Operational Guidelines, op.cit. pg. 7.

[7] IASC, Operational Guidelines, op.cit. pg. 9

[8] Chris Kromm and Sue Sturgis, “Hurricane Katrina and the Guiding Principles on Internal Displacement”, Institute for Southern Studies, January, 2008. pg. 13 http://www.southernstudies.org/ISSKatrinaHumanRightsJan08.pdf

[9] “’Never again,’ again,” New York Times editorial, 20 September 2008, http://www.nytimes.com/2008/09/21/opinion/21sun2.html?scp=29&sq=evacuation%20gustav&st=cse

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Essay on “Human Being and Natural Disaster” Complete Essay for Class 10, Class 12 and Graduation and other classes.

Human Being and Natural Disaster

POINTS TO DEVELOP

Human beings have always been victims of natural disasters.

Fear of disasters has not made humans more Cautious or careful in conserving environment.

To an extent, science has helped humans in facing up to natural disasters-prediction is possible in some cases, so timely evacuation saves human lives.

Human beings are, however, still vulnerable.

Natural disasters bring out the best and the Worst in human beings.

Only partial success in facing up to and coping With natural disasters.

Since ancient time, human beings have been victims of natural disasters of different kind upon the face of the earth. Be it an earthquake, flood, a cyclone or a volcanic eruption, humans have always held a fear of any natural catastrophe. The primary reason for such fear IS not hard to guess-it has been human inability to cope with natural disasters. Today, we are scientifically and technologically superior to our ancestors. Advancements in science have indeed helped us predict many disasters and opened up ways to control some of them. However, the damage inflicted by natural disasters is huge even today. Why is it so? Are natural disasters in the modern era a result of natural forces alone?

It is ironical that while we dread such disasters for the suffering they inflict upon us, we play a part in causing them to take place. Reckless use of technological capability has been responsible for much of environmental degradation and its unfavourable effects. There is also the use of natural resources without an effort to sustain a balance in our ecological system. For instance, impounding of water in reservoirs behind dams in tectonically unstable areas induces as well as increases the danger of earthquakes, indiscriminate falling of trees and the thinning forest cover are factors that contribute to floods. Mining on a large scale induces landslides. It appears that we human beings have been unable to limit our actions responsible for ecological degradation and natural disasters in spite of knowing the extent to which they can cause damage.

To a certain extent, science has helped humans to cope with natural disasters by limiting the amount of damage caused. Natural disasters result not only in loss of material wealth but also cause extreme physical and mental suffering to the victims. Such disasters affect not just a few persons; the damage is usually on a large scale, leaving behind thousands of suffering people. Owing to technological and scientific development, natural disasters can be predicted to a great extent nowadays. A chain of seismographs, for instance, can generate data that provides early warnings. Equipment is also available for identifying flood-prone areas and evacuating these areas before the floods. So can the eruption of a volcano or the coming of a cyclone be detected and the population evacuated from the danger areas before the disaster strikes. it is true that installing advanced equipment to detect such disasters is an expensive affair. Many of the poor nations, preoccupied with the problem of providing the basic necessities of life to their populations, can neither give adequate attention to the problem of predicting disasters nor afford the necessary equipment. But an encouraging sign in this context is the recent advancements in weather technology systems. These allow detection of disasters across the globe from any place on the earth. The development in communication technology has also been such that information can be immediately imparted to the victim nation or nations which can then begin evacuation work at the earliest. But it is surprising that even a scientifically and technologically advanced country like Japan has been unable to cope with major earthquakes in recent years. So how and where do humans almost inevitably fail?

Generally speaking, what is usually noticeable is human being’s delayed reaction to any natural disaster. A lot of time is lost between first receiving the news of a potential disaster and getting the areas to be affected cleared of people. Lack of funds is a serious problem in ensuring the availability of the right kind of technology to cope with such disasters. Sometimes the level of technology available may be such as to help minimize damage but constraint in funds prevents its utilization. Earthquake-proof houses can be built to limit the damage inflicted by earthquakes but such houses are rarely built. Sheer human carelessness is an unexplainable factor. In spite of adequate warning, a nonchalant attitude on the part of the government may hamper prevention and relief activities. Administrative lapses owing to indifference play a prominent role in aggravating the problem. Even the people are sometimes quite unwilling to vacate the areas to be affected, and this is not always due to lack of education. People are attached to their homes, the land or the village, town or city or they own fertile lands in the area and fear unemployment impoverishing them. It is also observed that some people are ready to incur material loss by floods and earthquakes in desire of the compensation that would be awarded to them by the government. People are also not always adequately warned and rightly informed about the impending catastrophe. While dwelling on natural disasters and human ability to cope with them, it is significant to point out that the struggle to cope with such a disaster brings out the best and the worst in humans.

International cooperation is high when it comes to communicating disaster-related information to the nation that is to be affected. Even after the disaster strikes and rehabilitation is on, there is no dearth of offers from foreign countries to help clear the affected site and resettle the people. Countries express willingness to denote finances to help the affected people. Within the affected nation also, cooperation is high between the various units engaged in relief and aid activities. The feelings of the masses are stirred and they are willing to assist in help and support to the afflicted. A nation comes together in the wake of such disasters. Disasters also help to set in motion sincere research and study of the factors that caused the disaster and of better ways to predict and prevent such disasters in the future.

At the same time, a natural disaster exposes the various human frailties and faults that led to the disaster in the first place. All kinds of unpleasant details come to the fore-for instance, how lack of planning and corruption on the part of the administration failed to provide safety and limit damage as evident in cyclone-hit Orissa recently. Even after the disaster has struck, efforts to provide short-term as well as long-term relief to the victims are usually hampered by interference from vested interests within and outside the administrative set-up. Where the victims are concerned, in the struggle for survival-as one may call it-those who have been deeply afflicted and require urgent relief may be ignored by the assisting people. Natural disasters also do not come alone; one such disaster may lead to many other problems caused by poor sanitation, health and rehabilitation work. .

Natural disasters are not really under our control. But if we discipline our actions and give more attention to how they affect our environment, many disasters would not occur. Or at least the factors causing them would not be aggravated. Once a natural disaster occurs, many shortcomings on the part of human beings increase the damage and multiply the sufferings caused. Technological means alone are not enough to limit the damage caused by disasters; what is necessary is prompt action to deliver relief as effectively as possible at the earliest.

Humans have certainly learnt over the ages how to face natural disasters, even cope with them to an extent. But even now the fury of nature can reduce the scientifically advanced and technologically equipped human being to a practical non-entity.

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Daniel Seduski

How Urbanization is Affecting Natural Disaster Risk Assessment

The Global Facility for Disaster Reduction and Recovery (GFDRR) examines this dynamic and its relationship to disaster risk assessment in their recently released report The Making of a Riskier Future: How Our Decisions are Shaping Future Disaster Risk .  A few of the document’s key points are summarized below as well as in this short GFDRR video .

• Population increase and climate change are the largest driving factors of urbanization. Worldwide, “up to 1.4 million people are moving into cities every week, with up to 90 percent [of this migration] happening in Africa and Asia.”
• Wealthy nations, companies, and citizens employ resources to adequately prevent natural disasters from inflicting catastrophic damage, whereas their impoverished counterparts lack the ability to do so. The report cites global flooding as an example: “in the last 20 years, low-income countries experienced just over a quarter of floods, but bore nearly 90 percent of related casualties.”
•  “[G]lobal losses from disasters have nearly quadrupled over the last few decades, from an average of $50 billion per year in the 1980s to close to $200 billion per year over the past decade.”
• The three main components to natural disaster risk assessment are (1) hazard or the type of disaster (earthquake, hurricane, etc.); (2) exposure , which refers to a population’s layout and economic ability to mitigate the effects of a natural disaster; and (3) vulnerability , which refers to “the susceptibility of the exposed elements to the natural hazard.”
• The majority of natural disaster risk assessment evaluates the potential effects of a disaster at any given time, and is thus termed ‘static’. The report argues that “All three of [the aforementioned] components are dynamic, and change over time under natural and human conditions,” thus disaster risk assessment should adapt appropriately to evaluate the three components dynamically.
• Hazard:  Climate Change Mitigation , Urban Design , and Resource Planning
• Vulnerability: Urban Planning/Construction and Social Safety Nets
• Exposure: Land-Use Planning and Managed Urban Expansion

For more resources on Climate Change , Earthquakes , Hurricanes , and Wildfires , visit the Homeland Security Digital Library (some documents may require HSDL login).

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