Natural disaster

• 1. Introduction

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  In 1976, scholars began calling the term "natural disaster" a misnomer. The phrase felt simple enough. An earthquake strikes, a flood rises, a community suffers. But a small group of researchers insisted the word natural was doing quiet, dangerous work. It told people the devastation was inevitable, out of human control, and simply part of the way the world turns. That argument sits at the heart of this story. A natural disaster, in plain terms, is the very harmful impact on a society brought by a natural phenomenon or hazard. Yet the same hazard can pass through two communities and ruin only one. Why does an earthquake become a hazard in one place and a catastrophe in another? Why do more women than men die in some events? And why, over the last hundred years, have deaths from these events fallen by 75 percent while the costs keep climbing? The answers lead through volcanoes and tsunamis, through refugee camps and voting booths, and toward a single uncomfortable idea: that the disaster is rarely just nature's fault.

• 2. A Misnomer Worth Abandoning

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  "Disasters are serious disruptions to the functioning of a community that exceed its capacity to cope using its own resources." That is the definition scholars prefer, and notice what it centers: the community, not the storm. A disaster happens when a hazard meets a vulnerable population. Take away the vulnerability and the same earthquake or drought may pass with little harm. An adverse event only becomes a disaster if it occurs in an area with a vulnerable population. The US Federal Emergency Management Agency draws the line sharply. A natural hazard is the threat of an event likely to have a negative impact. A natural disaster is what follows when that event actually harms a community. FEMA offers a clean example. An earthquake is the hazard. The 1906 San Francisco earthquake was the disaster. The critics push this further. Earthquakes, droughts, floods, and storms lead to disasters because of human action and inaction. Poor land planning, deregulation, inadequate building norms, the marginalization of people, overexploitation of resources, extreme urban sprawl. Calling the result natural, they argue, misleads people into thinking the devastation is inevitable. Hazards like earthquakes, hurricanes, and droughts are inevitable. The impact they have on society is not. There is a political stake in the word too. Defining disasters as solely natural shifts how we assign financial and political responsibility for prevention, compensation, and insurance. The conclusion these scholars reach is blunt: abandon the term natural disaster, and instead name the simple word disaster alongside the specific type of hazard.

• 3. Where The Damage Falls

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  As of 2019, the countries losing the highest share of disability-adjusted life years to natural disasters were the Bahamas, Haiti, Zimbabwe, and Armenia, the last probably owing mainly to the Spitak Earthquake. Geography concentrates the risk. The Asia-Pacific region is the world's most disaster-prone, and a person living there is five times more likely to be hit by a natural disaster than someone living elsewhere. Between 1995 and 2015, the greatest number of natural disasters struck America, China, and India. The year 2012 offers a snapshot of a moderate year, with 905 natural disasters worldwide. Of these, 93 percent were weather-related. Storms made up 45 percent, floods 36 percent, climatological events like heat waves and droughts 12 percent, and geophysical events like earthquakes and eruptions only 7 percent. Overall costs reached 170 billion US dollars, with insured losses of 70 billion. The death rate from natural disasters runs highest in developing countries, where building construction, infrastructure, and medical facilities are of lower quality, and where communication and disaster-risk-reduction systems are often weak. That gap in preparedness, not the strength of the hazard, is what decides who survives.

• 4. The Long Decline In Deaths

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  Over the last 100 years, the total number of deaths from natural disasters has fallen by 75 percent. The reasons are unglamorous but powerful: countries developed, populations grew better prepared, education improved, methods sharpened, and international organizations sent aid. Because the global population also grew across that century, the drop measured per person is even steeper. Deaths per capita fell to 6 percent of their original amount. The economic story moves in the opposite direction. Global losses from extreme weather, climate, and water events have increased sevenfold from the 1970s to the 2010s. Between 2015 and 2021, direct losses from disasters averaged above 330 billion US dollars a year. The main driver is not fiercer storms but greater exposure. Population growth and increased wealth mean there is simply more in harm's way, though part of the rise also traces to human-induced climate change. The shape of the hazard matters as well. Tornadoes and flash floods are rapid onset events, arriving with little warning and passing quickly. Drought is the opposite, a slow onset hazard that can develop over years before its damage is fully felt.

• 5. Who Suffers Most

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  In the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami, more women died than men, partly because fewer women knew how to swim. The pattern is not biological. It grows from the social, political, and cultural context of many places, where women are often disproportionately affected by disaster. During and after an event, disrupted police enforcement, lax regulations, and displacement raise the risk of gender-based violence and sexual assault. Religion-based scapegoating compounds the harm. Fanatical leaders have claimed that gods are angry with women's independent behavior, such as dressing immodestly or seeking abortions. After the August 2018 Kerala floods, the Hindutva party Hindu Makkal Katchi and others blamed women's struggle to enter the Sabarimala temple, claiming the angry god Ayyappan had inflicted the floods. LGBT people and immigrants face similar scapegoating. Pregnant women form another group hit hard. Inadequate nutrition, little clean water, lost health-care services, and psychological stress can sharply raise maternal morbidity and mortality. A shortage of medical resources can turn even a routine obstetric complication into an emergency. When health systems break down, access to contraceptives can vanish too, and unprotected intercourse during this time can raise rates of unintended pregnancy and sexually transmitted infections. Recovery itself can deepen vulnerability. A community may take many years to repair, and the disaster's effects often surface as post-traumatic symptoms, which collective processing can help convert into resilience and renewed engagement.

• 6. The Politics Of Response

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  Citizens watch how their governments handle disasters, and some carry that judgment into the voting booth. Theorists of voting behavior propose that people update their sense of government effectiveness based on disaster response, which then shapes their next vote. Evidence from the United States supports this. Incumbent parties can lose votes when citizens see them as responsible for a poor response, and gain votes when relief work is perceived as well executed. There is a catch with troubling consequences. The same research finds that voters do not reward incumbents for disaster preparedness, only for visible relief after the fact. That asymmetry may quietly weaken a government's incentive to invest in preparing before the next hazard ever arrives.

• 7. The Second Disaster

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  After the 2010 earthquake in Haiti, the waste from relief operations earned its own grim name: a "second disaster." The United States military reported distributing millions of water bottles and styrofoam food packages while no operational waste-management system existed. Emergency shelters demanded over 700,000 plastic tarpaulins and 100,000 tents. The plastic piled up, poor disposal blocked open drainage channels, and the blocked drains raised the risk of disease. Disasters generate enormous waste in a short time, just when waste management is given low priority and existing services may be knocked out. The 2011 tsunami in Japan produced debris that the Japanese Ministry of the Environment estimated at 5 million tonnes. Some of it, mostly plastic and styrofoam, washed up on the coasts of Canada and the United States in late 2011, multiplying litter along the west coast of the United States by a factor of 10 and possibly carrying alien species across the ocean. Storms add to the load. A study by Lo and colleagues in 2020 reported a 100 percent increase in microplastics on surveyed beaches after a 2018 typhoon in Hong Kong. Conflict displacement tells a parallel story. Sahrawi refugees have lived in five camps near Tindouf, Algeria for nearly 45 years, where underfunded collection and no recycling have left plastics flooding the streets. The contrast is the Azraq camp in Jordan, which produces 20.7 tonnes of waste a day, of which 15 percent is recyclable, because it actually has waste-management services.

• 8. When Hazards Collide

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  A review of interactions across 21 natural hazards identified 90 possible ways one could trigger or worsen another. An earthquake may set off landslides. A wildfire may raise the future probability of landslides. Human activity joins the web too, as when groundwater abstraction triggers groundwater-related subsidence. This is why single-hazard assessments, which treat each threat as isolated, fall short. A multi-hazard approach tries to map all possible hazards and their interrelationships at once. The chains can be deadly. Earthquakes by themselves rarely kill, the source notes; it is the secondary events, building collapse, fires, tsunamis, and volcanic eruptions, that take lives. Volcanoes show the same cascade. The 1985 Armero tragedy buried the town of Armero under a lahar, a volcanic mudflow, killing an estimated 23,000 people, and a lahar also caused the 1953 Tangiwai disaster. At the extreme edge sits the supervolcano. Under the Toba catastrophe theory, an eruption at what is now Lake Toba in Sumatra, between 75,000 and 80,000 years ago, may have cut the human population to as few as 10,000 or even 1,000 breeding pairs and killed three-quarters of plant life in the northern hemisphere, though the theory remains debated. Turning hazard analysis into genuine risk reduction means asking how vulnerable the built environment is to each threat. That step is well developed for seismic risk, less so for hazards that lack fragility curves linking a hazard's intensity to the probability of damage. For people forced from their homes by these events, the legal scaffolding is recent: the 1998 UN Guiding Principles on Internal Displacement and the 2009 Kampala Convention now protect those displaced by natural disasters.