Each year, disasters cause deaths, significant damage, hinder development, and lead to conflict and forced immigration. Unfortunately, there is a trend of increasing.
In May 2017, disaster management experts and policy makers from more than 180 countries met in Cancun to discuss how to combat this trend.
The Cancun Summit was interrupted by the news that large areas of Sri Lanka had been devastated by landslides and floods. At least 150 people were killed and almost 500,000 people were displaced.
The summit was a reminder to the participants of their challenging task: to pave the way for a reduction of disaster losses “significantly”, by 2030, based on Sendai Framework for Disaster Risk Reduction.
The Sendai Framework, adopted in 2015, outlines seven goals and four priority actions to reduce and prevent disasters that threaten economic, physical, cultural, environmental, health, or social assets, as well as the lives and livelihoods of individuals, businesses, communities, and countries.
Rescuers continue to search for the missing in a Chinese village that was devastated by a land slide.
Social root causes of disaster
When people are impacted by natural or technological hazards, such as when property or lives are destroyed, they are considered disasters. In his 1979 book “Man in the Holocene”, the Swiss author Max Frisch noted that only humans can recognize catastrophes if they survive. Nature does not recognise them.
A study carried out in Sri Lanka indicates that, while heavy rains were the cause of the flooding, its root causes are social. These include widespread poverty, conflict-induced immigration and problematic land use practices. These characteristics are not uniform, so different people and places are affected differently.
Hazard managers must pay attention to the social characteristics of communities because they can increase the vulnerability of people.
In order to reduce disaster losses in the next decade, a global community must tackle these social causes of disaster. The lofty goals set out in the Sendai Framework won’t be achieved if we don’t.
Pockets of vulnerability in societies
DRR experts have, as is understandable, focused their attention on socially disadvantaged groups exposed to hazards. Hazards tend to affect primarily those social groups who were already in a disadvantaged position before the disaster.
The social disadvantages of “underdeveloped” and “developing” countries are more obvious. When studying the social aspect of food insecurity in the Sahel Region in the mid-1980s during droughts, researchers found that families with low incomes and many children are more susceptible to chronic hunger.
There are groups of people who live in areas where there is a higher socio-economic level, but they can be at risk as well.
It seems that the assumption that members of wealthy societies are immune to disasters is widely held, possibly because vulnerability might be less obvious. attempts at indexing and comparing vulnerability in communities, regions or entire nations seem to reinforce this (mis-)belief.
This is because comparing aggregated economic characteristics to disaster risk can lead to false conclusions. This is the ” Ecological Fallacy” problem, in which relationships at the aggregate level are not always true on an individual basis.
Research in the 1990s showed that homeless people living in Tokyo, at the time the richest city in the world, were more vulnerable to earthquake hazards. The government’s emergency planning neglected this ‘invisible sub-population.’ The ‘ecological Fallacy’ in this case meant that emergency planning activities were geared towards a higher social-economic class.
A homeless man snuggles into a sleeping bag and lays on a bench in an underground passage near Sendai Station. December 2013. Kato/Reuters
In addition, a study conducted after Hurricane Katrina hit New Orleans in 2005 showed that households and communities with a socio-economic disadvantage were affected in a disproportional way. They lacked the ability to respond, prepare and recover.
These examples from wealthy and less wealthy countries show the importance of considering social vulnerability more nuancedly in terms of geography and demographics when implementing DRR. One hand, less affluent communities may bring other capabilities that are not financial to DRR. On the other, ignoring social disadvantages within wealthy contexts can lead to significant losses in life and property and misses out on the chance to improve the situation of affected subpopulations.