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Interpretation of Calamity From the Viewpoint of Human Ecology
Abstract
The 15 papers in this book are all abstracted separately. They are arranged in three sections: natural disaster: mischance or misnomer; hazards in context: problems of agricultural development and food security; alternative frameworks.-K.Clayton
... During the twentieth century and building on historical accounts, geographers transformed the global approach to disaster risk through their detailed work on vulnerability (Adger 2006;Cardona 2004;Hewitt 1983;Pelling and Uitto 2001;Wisner and Luce 1993;Wisner et al. 2004). However, some have also critiqued the concept (Bankoff 2001;Marino and Faas 2020): labelling a community as 'vulnerable' can act as a means of 'othering', for example, and a push towards 'resilience' can be used by neoliberal governments as a tool of governmentality (Grove 2013(Grove , 2014Reid, 2012). ...
... The diversity in the characterisation of what actually constitutes disaster risk also reflects disciplinary disparities in power and influence. This is part of the challenge for interdisciplinary hazards geography: it is often the physical sciences that are best placed to advise governments on disaster risk, and this reinforces the technical-rational imaginaries that pre-exist in many government approachesa key concern of disaster studies for over 40 years (Burton, Kates and White 1968;Hewitt 1983;Wisner, Gaillard and Kelman 2012;Wisner et al. 2004) in emphasising that vulnerability is the major driver of disaster risk. Although the UNDRR has championed a broader approach, at national level there is still a great deal of work to be done: it is politically much more challenging to reduce vulnerability than it is to fund physical monitoring for example. ...
This Progress Report reviews the geographical literature concerning environmental hazards and risk focussing particularly on areas that require and enhance interdisciplinary working between human and physical geographers. Although there are still substantial gaps between disciplinary siloes, there is a growing recognition that critical interdisciplinary work is vital. Key areas include early warning, urban planning, hazard and risk mapping, scientific advisory processes, risk communication and institutional geographies. We review some of this work, examine emerging theory and consider the opportunities for greater knowledge exchange between disciplines using critical physical geography and cognate approaches.
... Moreover, it is essential to consider that risk assessment and management is not a technocratic, scientific endeavour disconnected from everyday policymaking processes. The latter, very often, have more bearing on risk outcomes than the scientific understandings of the issues in question (Hewitt, 1983;Collins, 2009;Lavell and Maskrey, 2014;Nightingale et al., 2020). Linking knowledge to decision making is not a linear and one-way process, but it rather requires new approaches to the intersections of knowledge and power which can enrich disciplinary engagements with the politics of interconnected crises (Mahony and Hulme 2018;Mahony, 2020). ...
The COVID-19 pandemic demonstrated the fragility of international, national, regional, and local risk management systems. It revealed an urgent need to improve risk planning, preparedness, and communication strategies. In parallel, it created an opportunity to drastically rethink and transform societal processes and policies to prevent future shocks originating not only from health, but also combined with those related to climate change and biodiversity loss. In this perspective, we examine how to improve integrated risk assessment and management (IRAM) capacities to address interconnected shocks. We present the results from a series of workshops within the framework of the University of Zurich and University of Geneva. Initiative "Shaping Resilient Societies: A Multi-Stakeholder Approach to Create a Responsive Society". This initiative gathered experts from multiple disciplines to discuss their perspectives on resilience; here we present the key messages of the "Pan-demics, Climate and Sustainability" thinking group. We identify a roadmap and selected research areas concerning the improvement of IRAM analysis capacities, practices, policies. We recommend the development of robust data systems and science-policy advice systems to address combined shocks emerging from health, biodiversity loss and climate change. We posit that further developing the IRAM framework to include these recommendations will improve societal preparedness and response capacity and will provide more empirical evidence supporting decision-making and the selection of strategies and measures for integrated risk reduction.
... The eventual realization of the multi-stakeholder nature of DRR (Clark-Ginsberg 2020) -Disaster Risk Management is everyone's business -underscores the fact that the translation of disaster risk into disaster is inseparably linked with people's decisions (Hewitt 1983;De Milliano 2015) and hence the perception of disaster risk. This view-embodied in the 'resilience' and 'vulnerability' paradigms of disaster management-emphasizes that disaster risk is the outcome of everyday decisions such as those related to land use, social behavior, political and economic structures, which construct vulnerability, many hazards, and the capacity to reduce risk (Oliver-Smith 2013; Wisner et al. 2004). ...
Courses on Disaster Risk Management, especially e-courses, can be found in multitudes. Some are free, some are paid and yet there remains a huge gap in the basic understanding of what disaster risk is! A good percentage of these courses are served with ingredients which are archaic and do not conform to the recent developments in the realm of disaster risk management, thus creating a huge chasm, pushing away the prospect of making individuals more risk-literate!
The Gujarat Institute of Disaster Management launched an online e-course which addressed many of the above impediments. To maximise its impact and to ensure that the course remains effective many key factors were tweaked, that ranged from selection of platforms to leveraging the power of 'good' disaster risk governance. In fact, it was established through analysis that such courses when offered in a vernacular language attracts more audience and seemingly becomes popular.
... The first phase was the "human adjustment" approach to flood management outlined by Gilbert F. White in the 1930s-1940s (Hass and White, 1975. This approach was augmented in the 1970s and 1980s by efforts to take the "naturalness" out of natural disasters (O'Keefe et al., 1976;Hewitt, 1983). Finally, this approach was mainstreamed in the 1990s and early 2000s with the "pressureand-release" (PAR) vulnerability model from the human ecology school in the US, first developed by Wisner et al., in 1994(Adger, 1996Cutter, 1996;Wisner et al., 2004Wisner et al., , 2012Tierney, 2014) and is now widely used in United Nations disaster risk reduction and climate adaptation reports (IPCC, 2007(IPCC, , 2014(IPCC, , 2022UNISDR, 2015). ...
Historical information about floods is not commonly used in the US to inform land use planning decisions. Rather, the current approach to managing floods is based on static maps derived from computer simulations of the area inundated by floods of specified return intervals. These maps provide some information about flood hazard, but they do not reflect the underlying processes involved in creating a flood disaster, which typically include increased exposure due to building on flood-prone land, nor do they account for the greater hazard resulting from wildfire. We developed and applied an approach to analyze how exposure has evolved in flood hazard zones in Montecito, California, an area devastated by post-fire debris flows in January 2018. By combining historical flood records of the past 200 years, human development records of the past 100 years, and geomorphological understanding of debris flow generation processes, this approach allows us to look at risk as a dynamic process influenced by physical and human factors, instead of a static map. Results show that floods after fires, in particular debris flows and debris laden floods, are very common in Montecito (15 events in the last 200 years), and that despite policies discouraging developments in hazard areas, developments in hazard zones have increased substantially since Montecito joined the National Flood Insurance Program in 1979. We also highlight the limitation of using conventional Flood Insurance Rate Maps (FIRMs) to manage land use in alluvial fan areas such as Montecito. The knowledge produced in this project can help Montecito residents better understand how they came to be vulnerable to floods and identify action they are taking now that might increase or reduce their vulnerability to the next big flood. This science-history-centric approach to understand hazard and exposure evolution using geographic information systems (GIS) and historical records, is generalizable to other communities seeking to better understand the nature of the hazard they are exposed to and some of the root causes of their vulnerabilities, in other words, both the natural and social processes producing disasters.
... The idea, generally, is that higher levels of development in a country correspond to more resilience because of a higher capacity to adapt. Although poverty is not the same as vulnerability (Adger, 2006), previous studies have found a strong correlation between adaptive capacity and economic development (Cutter and Hewitt, 1984;Watts and Bohle, 1993;Adger, 2006). ...
Purpose
Disasters and armed conflict often co-occur, but does that imply that disasters trigger or fuel conflict? In the small but growing body of literature attempting to answer this question, divergent findings indicate the complex and contextual nature of a potential answer to this question. The purpose of this study is to contribute a robust cross-country analysis of the co-occurrence of disaster and conflict, with a particular focus on the potential role played by disaster.
Design/methodology/approach
Grounded in a theoretical model of disaster–conflict co-occurrence, this study merges data from 163 countries between 1990 and 2017 on armed conflict, disasters and relevant control variables (low human development, weak democratic institutions, natural resource dependence and large population size/density).
Findings
The main results of this study show that, despite a sharp increase in the co-occurrence of disasters and armed conflict over time, disasters do not appear to have a direct statistically significant relation with the occurrence of armed conflict. This result contributes to the understanding of disasters and conflicts as indirectly related via co-creation mechanisms and other factors.
Originality/value
This study is a novel contribution, as it provides a fresh analysis with updated data and includes different control variables that allow for a significant contribution to the field.
... This perspective, which views modernization as a solution to natural hazards, still influences academic work that focuses on hazards as independent and external to social context (see Perry 2007;Scott 2020) and grounds the practices of disaster risk reduction in some countries. This is reflected in the use of structural mitigation measures, i.e. the development of physical mitigation infrastructure, such as lava dams, flood embankments, etc., the measuring, scientific monitoring and prediction of geophysical processes, and the use of military forces as well as their military-style command model in the emergency responses (Hewitt 1983). ...
This paper suggests how natural disasters may serve as the final propulsion for changes already taking place within a society. While focusing on shifts in human-non-human animal relations, this text also discusses their embedding in broader transformations of human-environment relations and the underlying economic and cultural change. It carves out interspecific dependencies that constitute an agro-ecosystem and follows their demise as the agricultural species are switched to market economic production in a post-disaster context. It thereby suggests that the human-facilitated semiotic fitting of the agricultural species is replaced by human-imposed fitting in which the species composition is largely determined by the market prices. At the same time, the paper draws attention to the cessation and transformation of human-non-human communication as a marker, but also an experiential corollary, of modernization and market economy. As a case study, it focuses on the 2010 Mt. Merapi eruption in Indonesia and its aftermath in the villages on its slope. The study analyses how the shift from using plough buffalo to utilizing market economic cattle farming reflects not just an economic, but also an affective and semiotic change stemming from a shift in the intensity and kind of human-animal relations.
... Notably, all of White's suggested "adjustments" that became incorporated into what was known as the "dominant" approach in hazards mitigation and planning did not take systemic social processes into consideration, for which it was critiqued by several contributors to Kennith Hewitt's Interpretations of Calamity in the early 1980s (Hewitt 1983; see Macdonald et al. 2012). Following much debate, studies of social vulnerability have taken a more interdisciplinary approach that encompassed some of White's central ideas along with those of his critics' which were that systemic issues such as poverty and marginalization are key contributors to the production of vulnerability (see Macdonald et al. 2012). ...
Decades of environmental justice research has focused on identifying existing patterns of disproportionate burdens to environmental harms across social difference. However, relatively few studies examine the “legacy effect” of historical patterns. In flood risk studies specifically, several scholars have highlighted the role of systemic processes in historically shaping and producing observed disparities in flood risk patterns. These studies reveal that such relations are tied to histories of racialized land struggles and territorial dispossessions. In this paper, I argue that scholars need to do more than quantify today’s disproportionate burdens across social difference or explain the systemic processes causing those disparities. I suggest that “legacy vulnerability” helps identify how the potential for harm from flood risk to marginalized groups may reside in events of the past that have imprinted a spatially hidden, but spatiotemporally revealed unjust pattern upon today’s landscape. In a flood risk assessment of Sapelo Island, the initial results suggest that when comparing contemporary flood risk of Sapelo’s Geechee descendant (Black and mostly low-to-middle income) to non-descendant newcomer owners (mostly white and affluent) an environmental justice disparity in proportional flood risk burden does not exist. However, results of a counterfactual flood risk assessment show that approximately one-third of historically owned, Geechee property is located outside the contemporary 100-year flood zone compared to zero percent outside of it today. In other words, roughly one-third of Geechee property’s flood risk today is a legacy vulnerability directly tied to racialized land dispossessions that unfolded in the middle twentieth century.
The aim of this literature engagement is to assess the trajectory of the thinking embodied in the Sendai Framework in the six years following its publication (2015 - 2021). It will first consider the literatures catalysed by each of the four priority areas of the Sendai Framework before moving on to engage four cross-cutting themes: the coherence agenda, the expanded scope of DRR, gender and inclusion, and DRR in urban areas.
This engagement makes no claims to being comprehensive. The quantity and diversity of both academic and grey literature is such that an encompassing review has become impossible, with over 80 academic journals dedicated to DRR and related fields in English alone (Alexander et al 2019) and a further ‘profusion of practitioner-driven literature’ (Sarmiento et al 2019). Instead, the aim of this engagement is to gesture towards the key discussions which have occurred in the field of DRR as researchers and practitioners work to implement the provisions of the Sendai Framework by 2030. By doing so, it seeks to provide a clear and concise basis for discussion of the effects of the Sendai Framework with a view to maximising its effectiveness in the period 2022 - 2030.
2023 marks the midpoint in the implementation of a number of sustainable development frameworks agreed in 2015, including the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development, the Addis Ababa Action Agenda for Financing for Development, the Paris Climate Agreement, and the Sendai Framework. Within this context, the UN General Assembly (UNGA) decided2 to hold a “midterm review of the implementation of the Sendai Framework 2015-2030” (MTR SF).
Energy systems (ES) are seriously affected by climate variability since energy demand and supply are dependent on atmospheric conditions at several time scales and by the impact of severe extreme weather events (EWEs). EWEs affect ES and can cause partial or total blackouts due to energy supply disruptions. These events significantly impact essential infrastructures and are considered one of the main causes of wide-area electrical disturbances worldwide. A comprehensive review is carried out based on 210 published studies using searches from Scopus and Google Scholar databases, to assess the impacts of EWEs—such as extreme storms, wind, and lightning events, heat, or cold waves, and freezing—on ES and their associated infrastructures—production, transmission, and distribution—worldwide, with a particular focus on wind energy systems (WES). Strategies and measures are critically reviewed and synthesized to minimize and mitigate the impact of EWEs, protect, and adapt the systems to maintain regular operations even when these events occur. Finally, physical modifications to systems and the incorporation of new technological solutions such as energy storage systems (ESS), distributed energy systems (DES), and microgrids, can enhance the network resilience and mitigate the EWEs effects.
Modern cities are embedded in regional urban systems as economic hubs and must adapt to the competitive global market. Conversely, it is often forgotten that most cities arise from rural areas and are constrained by nature and the history of agricultural landuse. Tensions between the two aspects of the city are meaningful in grasping the causes and consequences of the disaster. Accordingly, this paper explores the reconstruction process in the rural-urban fringe of the Sendai Metropolitan Area following the Great East Japan earthquake. The results indicate that although disaster reconstruction in this area accelerated existing trends of urban development overall, it revealed several frictions and problems caused by unthoughtful agricultural land-use changes. The historical understanding of human adaptation to the natural environment is significant for disaster studies. Furthermore, the approach to disasters from such a viewpoint is also significant for urban studies in understanding the city in the context of nature.
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