What qualifies as a disaster? │ The Science of Disasters with Ilan Kelman
What exactly is a disaster? How do we define such an event?
And is there really such a thing as a natural disaster?
Join Ilan Kelman, Professor of Disasters and Health at University College London, for this series, The Science of Disasters, in which he explains exactly what constitutes a disaster, why they happen and how we can better prepare for them.
Find out more:
Ilan Kelman https://www.ucl.ac.uk/risk-disaster-r...
What defines a disaster https://www.ifrc.org/en/what-we-do/disaster-management/about-disasters/what-is-a-disaster/
How would you define a disaster? Is it a question of a heart or soul? Or does it depend on the numbers of the destruction? I’m Ilan Kelman. Stay with me to find out more in this new series: The Science of Disasters. Subscribe now.
What is a disaster? At the base level, trawling through hundreds of pages of academic writing on the definition, dozens of professional manuals and several dictionaries, the smallest number of words which I can use to define disaster is seven: “A situation requiring outside support for coping”. Something happens, we cannot deal with it, so we ask for help. This works at the individual level and the international level. It matches united nations, researchers, emergency services and dictionaries. It has vagueness, such as the words “situation”, “support” and “coping”, but vagueness can rarely be avoided. For me, the principal power of the words in this definition is that they are understandable, somewhat intuitive, and work across many, although certainly not all, versions of English. As for other languages and cultures, it might be different, which is also the case when we then try to explain why a disaster, a situation requiring outside support for coping, might arise.
To get a disaster, two peculiar concepts must come together: hazard and vulnerability. Examples of hazards are earthquakes, storms, tsunamis, landslides, floods, droughts, epidemics, meteorites and space weather, such as geomagnetic storms. Some happen quickly, some slowly, yet a changing environment by itself is not a disaster. Even current climate change, because considering the definition of disaster, we do not know whether or not we would be able to cope with it. Some people could, and some people could not.
We need to consider this element of coping: how society deals or cannot deal with hazards. This element is vulnerability, of being vulnerable to something, a societal process setting up people and communities to be harmed by potential hazards. It could be poorly constructed buildings, breaking planning regulations, not having insurance, not receiving or understanding warning messages because you do not speak the language, not being able to evacuate because you are sick or have mobility difficulties, fearing assault in an emergency shelter, and many others, which can make it difficult to deal with a hazard, even when we know exactly what we should do.
Consider earthquakes and think about how many deaths worldwide have been caused by earthquakes in human history. This phrasing is deliberate. How many deaths have been caused by earthquakes? The answer is effectively zero. Almost no one in human history has had their cause of death described as “earthquake”. This might seem to be a rather odd statement. Why not, considering how many earthquake disasters have hit the news, from Japan in 1995 to Haiti in 2010? The reason is that infrastructure collapses killed the people, not the earthquake. The earthquake unfolds quickly as an event confined in space and time, but it took a long time and morphed societal processes for the urban planning, building codes and construction to manifest in such a way that infrastructure collapsed and killed people. This base cause of the disaster results from humanity’s decisions, attitudes, values, behaviour and activities over the long term.
Hazards only rarely cause disasters. Vulnerability is the basic reason why disasters happen. And vulnerability is created and continued over a long time period. This means that no disasters happen quickly, all disasters happen slowly. This means that disasters are not natural because they are caused by vulnerabilities. This means that a disaster, a situation requiring outside support for coping, exists and occurs because of vulnerabilities. Our decisions to create and not to reduce vulnerabilities is, in effect, the disaster.
So, what kills, maims and displaces people in, say, an earthquake? Is it down to the earthquake alone? Join me next time to find out.
And while you’re here, why not subscribe now to watch all the episodes in the series The Science of Disasters?
