The Geographic Influence on the Study of Natural Hazards
Prepared By Hans N. Lechner
Geography 601: History and Theory
Professor Kevin St. Martin
December 16, 2002
In 1974 over 2,000 people in Bangladesh were killed during flooding of the Ganges and Brahmaputra Rivers and millions found themselves without a home (Davis 1992). More than 60 percent of the country was flooded and most of the summer crops were destroyed. Was this disaster the result of an unusually intense monsoon season or heavier snowfall near the headwaters of the two rivers? Could it have been the result of massive deforestation in the upper watershed or intense cultivation and high population density in the floodplain? Or was this disaster the combination of both physical and social factors?
An earthquake in Tangshan, China in 1976 killed over 650,000 and injured more than 780,000 (Davis, 1992). The industrial city was virtually destroyed in a matter of seconds. Are plate tectonics and other forces of nature to be blamed for this incredible loss of life? Could the blame be placed on the Chinese government for allowing development on an active fault? Maybe the weak structural design of the homes and buildings is to blame? Perhaps the blame can be found in the combination of human actions and natural systems.
On November 13, 1985 an estimated 25,000 people were killed in Columbia when a lahar swept down the Lagunillas river valley on the side Nevo del Ruiz volcano and destroyed the town of Armero (Sigurdsson and Carey 1986). It was only a small Plinian eruption that caused rapid melting of a valley glacier, which created the lahar. Unfortunately, the residents of Armero were living within the floodplain of the Rio Lagunillas and were inundated by the saturated volcanic ash and soil. Hazard warnings had been issued yet ignored. This disaster could have easily been avoided. Humans or nature, which is to blame?
Floods, earthquakes, volcanic eruptions, in fact all hazards are unavoidable. They are part of the physical processes that form this planet. Disasters, on the other hand, can be avoided. The examples above all represent unnecessary losses of life and property. Had humans chosen to build their societies more strategically many of these calamities may have never occurred. There are many reasons why people locate in hazardous areas. To the people of Bangladesh the land adjacent to the rivers represents incredibly fertile soil. In China, perhaps a lack of geologic investigation allowed the seismic hazards to remain unknown for too long. In the case of Armero, the dependency on agriculture, or maybe social and economic factors were the driving forces that caused a town to develop near a river in a volcanic landscape. Whatever the reason, people occupy areas subject to geophysical processes thereby creating a risk and exposing themselves to natural hazards. Disasters are not caused by physical phenomena alone, land use and population density are also major contributing factors (Burton, et, al. 1993).
Recently humans have been coming to this realization. There has always been a boundary between the world that humans manipulate for our society to grow and the natural world that progresses with or without human influence. However, human society is growing and consuming more of the natural world and often times the boundary is being crossed. Cities, towns and people push themselves onto the natural landscape and sometimes the natural landscape pushes back. An earthquake, flood, cyclone, landslide, or volcanic eruption – an event produced by nature that causes losses in the cultural landscape – can help reinvigorate the realization that humans are intimately connected to the natural world. This realization can renew our interest for information about and the natural world and change our 'landscape ethic'. Leopold (1949, p. 353) explains it as a role change for humans from "conqueror of the land community to plain member and citizen of it." Some societies are developing a strong awareness of limited resources, while others have an intimate bond with nature. Some social systems seem very short sighted and display little regard for nature and human's connection to it.
Natural hazards are increasing because the interface between social systems and geosystems is shifting and growing smaller. More people are being exposed to the forces of nature and the degree of vulnerability is shifting as well. Human and physical geographers have examined natural hazards and found the study of vulnerability as an interface where these two branches of geography meet. The purpose of this paper is to examine a geographical approach that can been used to investigate the role of natural hazards as part of the human-environment interface and what methods can be used to define the discipline. By focusing on the role of vulnerability in hazards research I hope to put my interests into the context of the geographical discipline.
Here I will define some of the terminology used in the hazards discourse. There is no single definition of hazard and the associated terms: risk, exposure, vulnerability and response. The definitions have been the product of much debate among several disciplines and professions such as sociology, political science, disaster and relief specialist, and geography (Alexander, 2000; Shuang et al., 2002).
Natural hazard can be defined as a naturally induced event with the potential to cause loss (Mitchell, 1990; Smith, 2001). According to Mitchell (1990) the study of natural hazards can be simply defined by one equation:
Hazard = f(Risk X Exposure X Vulnerability X Response)
If we treat response as a separate variable, which indicates economic and social ability to respond to and recover from a natural hazard, and remove it from the equation then we can effectively say: Natural hazards are increasing because populations are growing within an area that has the potential to generate a geophysical event that would probably cause damage to people and the things that they value.
Natural hazards are a function of risk, exposure, vulnerability and response. Risk indicates the probability that a given event will cause damage to lives and property. Exposure indicates the population that is at risk of being affected by the event. Vulnerability measures the potential lose that will occur. Response is a society's ability to adapt, respond to and recover from a damaging event.
Mitchell (1990) has defined risk as the probability of a damaging event or circumstance. Smith (2001) defines it as the exposure of something humans value to a hazard and regard it as the product of probability and loss. A certain volcanic event would probably create a major disaster within the city and threaten all of its inhabitants and the things that they value, thus creating the risk.
Vulnerability is the most important term for understanding the study of natural hazards. Smith (2001, p.25) uses Timmerman's definition of vulnerability as "the degree to which a system, or part of a system, may react adversely to the occurrence of a hazardous event." There seems to be an ongoing debate as to how to conceptualize the term. A social system may react adversely to an event due to its magnitude and frequency or because of the social structure in place. According to Shaung et al. (2002) there are two principal perspectives of vulnerability among the various disciplines. The first, which is referred to as the 'dominant' paradigm, views vulnerability as a level of exposure to a natural hazard. For example, Alexander's (2000, p.12) definition of vulnerability – "…the potential for casualty, destruction, damage, disruption or other form of loss with respect to a particular element." – is of this perspective. It suggests that people are vulnerable because they occupy a risk zone. The second perspective, or 'structural' paradigm, views vulnerability as a function of the social and economic situation of an exposed society. Blaikie, et al. (1994, p.9) defines vulnerability as "…the characteristics of a person or group in terms of their capacity to anticipate, cope with, resist and recover from the impact of a natural hazard," which suggests that some groups within society are more likely to experience damage and loss from a given natural hazard. Both approaches provide valuable insight into the study of hazards, but neither can be considered the epistemological end to the understanding of vulnerability.
The study of natural hazards can probably be traced back to 79 A.D. when Pliny the Younger wrote a detailed account of the eruption of Pompeii. From that time much of the knowledge about natural hazards has been advanced primarily by research of physical scientists. Hazards were commonly viewed as isolated geophysical events with little connection to human society and its level of vulnerability and response. Many scientists saw the events as controllable by landscape alterations and engineering creations (Sheets & Grayson, 1979; Smith, 2001). However, within this perspective a dilemma did exist as a duel between uniformitarianism – the idea that geophysical events occur in the present with the same frequency and magnitude and results as they have through earth’s history – and catastrophism – which held that earth’s history could be explained by a series of violent or catastrophic events (Alexander, 2000).
Are hazards to be considered a mild and progressive nuisance or is the extreme event the greatest threat to human kind? Whether large or a small it is the interaction with people that creates the hazard.
Geographers have long been aware of the connection between humans and the environment usually for purposes of exploiting the earth's resources and examining human adaptation to the physical world.
Charles Darwin's studies on the distribution and morphology of species and the question of organisms being better adapted to their environments helped dismantle the strongbox that had contained geography and natural history for so long. From Darwinist geography came neo-Lamarkianism, which suggested that environmental influences could determine human characteristics. Environmental determinist geographers like Nathaniel Shaler, William Morris Davis and Ellsworth Huntington supported the view that human society, in fact human evolution, adapted to the forces of nature. Carl Sauer, an anthropomorphic geographer, also realized the inseparable connection between man and environment with his view of the 'cultural' landscape unfolding on a physical area. However, Gilbert White was the first geographer to look at the social costs connected to the exploitation environmental resources.
White's opinion (1975) is that natural hazards cannot exist apart from the human adjustments to them. Simply put, human presence creates the hazard. If a mild volcanic eruption occurs on the Kamchatka Peninsula hundreds of miles away from any human settlement no one is at risk, so there is no hazard. The probability that a geophysical event will occur still exists, but because there are no people exposed to the event the potential for damage or loss is nonexistent. If an urban settlement were to develop at the base of the volcano the city would be exposed to a an event, and be forced to make adjustments to the hazard.
While Gilbert White was a professor at the University of Chicago during the 1950's and 1960's he set out to identify the multiple uses of floodplains and understand the range of adjustments that allow humans to occupy them as well as the costs and benefits of particular places (Kates, 1997). White, and the Chicago School, felt that flooding was the fault of nature and that the obvious solution was a better built human landscape. White sought to use technical methods integrated with floodplain defense to develop an overall floodplain management scheme (Smith, 2001). The main objective of White's approach was to "evaluate the hazard's dimensions in order to predict the degree of impact and spatial dimension of the risk zone (Chester, 1993 p. 229)." The second objective was to create a range of human adjustments to various hazards. The focus on the human adjustment to natural hazards became recognized within the discipline of geography as the behavioral paradigm (Kates, 1997).
What White found using his new approach to flooding was that in the More Developed Countries (MDC's) the hazard was the result of poor management behavior by the authorities that allowed development to occur. In Less Developed Countries (LDC's) flood hazards were exacerbated by poor decision-making on the part of the local community, such as deforestation, overgrazing and other abusive land use practices (Smith, 2001). The Chicago School recognized that not all decisions regarding hazards were economically rational especially in the LDC's where people are more likely to make decisions based on flawed perceptions, such as folklore or religion (Chester, 1993; Smith, 2001).
From these findings developed a new view of public policy and a research approach based on the behavioral paradigm. The paradigm from the Chicago School initially investigated floodplains; however, the studies were eventually transferred to explore the applicability of the findings to other geophysical hazards and examine the interaction of the social and the natural systems (White and Haas, 1975). The school developed its guidelines and determined its primary goals. It created the necessary definitions and concepts to pursue these goals, and set forth five major hypotheses to be used for examination which White and Haas (1975) expressed were all subject to change as the field progresses. Chester (1993, p. 229) illustrates the five hypotheses:
1) To estimate the extent and nature of human occupancy in areas subject extreme natural events.
2) To determine the range of possible adjustments by social groups to these extreme events.
3) To examine how people perceive extreme events and the hazards resulting from them.
4) To examine the processes by which damage-reducing adjustments are chosen.
5) To estimate the effects of varying public policy upon the set of responses.
The Chicago School's paradigm also expresses the concept of vulnerability by looking at adjustments as a function of economic efficiency and government stability; however, the term vulnerability was not coined until sometime in the 1970's.
As the North American school of geographers looked further into natural hazards, White's behavioral paradigm gained more popularity among scholars (Smith, 2001). The main idea was that humans could adapt – make long term arrangements to deal with the hazard – by making some identified adjustments. White and Haas (1975) define adjustment as intentional actions that a society may take to cope with the risk and uncertainty of natural events. The three categories of adjustment are as follows: 1) modify the event; 2) modify the level of vulnerability; and 3) distribute the loss (White and Haas, 1975).
Modifying the event involves the implementation of hazard controls such as damns and levees, or in extreme cases, environmental modification such as cloud seeding or seismic-stress reduction. This can be difficult in LDC's that lack the required technical expertise and available budget for this type of adjustment.
Modifying the level of vulnerability is the largest category and involves reducing the loss potential. Examples include warning systems, education programs and preparedness, more stringent land management, etc. This category looks at long-term gains.
Distributing the loss is an attempt to spread the financial burden through the community, relief agencies, and insurance companies. This adjustment can come in the form of individual savings, private donations, government insurance, or international aid.
In a critique of the dominant view, Hewitt (1983) identified the three main thrusts that characterize the paradigm: emphasis on field monitoring and scientific explanation of the physical phenomena; commitment to physical and managerial control of the phenomena; formulation of disaster plans and emergency responses. Many governments adopted the paradigm as the appropriate manner in which to evaluate hazards and risk. Today the behavioral paradigm is still the most popular among western governments. However, it is often criticized as having too much faith in capitalism because it encourages the role of the individual decision maker at the expense of broader social and economic factors; and its emphasis on scientific and technical fixes is perceived as deterministic because it implies that the available human adjustments are controlled by environmental parameters (Chester, 1993; Smith, 2001).
During the late 1960's, while the Chicago School was pioneering the research of natural hazards by geographers, anthropologists and development workers began their own interpretations of hazard. Around 1975 the definition of vulnerability became highly fragmented between the various research areas (Smith, 2001). Geologists, hydrologists and civil engineers examined the scientific solutions to natural hazards, while sociologists, anthropologists and development studies put their emphasis on human behavior, reactions and preparedness to disasters (Alexander, 2000; Smith 2001). Of course there was some overlap between disciplines, especially, among the technical sciences; however, the fissures between the social and physical sciences presented a major obstacle in the way of progress towards an effective measure of vulnerability.
It was during the 1980's that sociologists began to apply the term vulnerability to the poor and disadvantaged (Smith, 2001). Wijkman and Timberlake, for example, (1984) looked at the disproportionate number of deaths in third world countries compared to those in developed countries and found the three major contributors to be poverty and inequality, environmental degradation and rapid population growth. Hewitt (1983) viewed hazards not as a degree of the geophysical event but as dependent upon the concerns, pressures, goals, risks, and most importantly social changes in a particular society and its relationship to the habitat and historical circumstances that shape the situation. The socio-political perspective, and Marxist creed, which had been growing since the mid 1970's tended to view individual choices as constrained by institutional forces and hazards as function of unequal social structures (Chester, 1993; Mitchell, 1990; Smith, 2001). The research approach that developed became known as the ‘structural’ paradigm.
Smith (2001) explains the structural paradigm as seeking a more defined distinction between geophysical triggers of a natural disaster and the social, economic and political pressures of the LDC's. He illustrates the five key points of the behavioral paradigm that challenge the dominant view (Smith, 2001):
1) That environmental disasters are not primarily dependent on the physical process, especially in LDC's.
2) Questions the assumption that disasters are unusual phenomena in the context of LDC's.
3) Asserts that victims are not to blame for their misfortune
4) That disaster mitigation in LDC's depends on structural change occurring in society.
5) Stresses a reliance on local knowledge rather than western science and imported technology.
Essentially the structural paradigm asserts that physical processes are not the sole cause of disasters but that the growth of a marginalized population increases the vulnerability to a given hazard. The population is unprepared to cope with even a mild geophysical event and recover their loses. This may be due to growing poverty, lack of resources, or inefficient government and mitigation structure. It also suggests that because of the marginalized situation the population's range of choices is limited and that continuous outside aid only creates reliance, which increases vulnerability. Blaike et al. (1994, p.5) has used the structural paradigm by stating, "People's vulnerability is generated by social, economic, and political processes that influence how hazards affect people in varying ways and differing intensities."
The key to studying hazards and vulnerability lies not only at understanding the interface of humans and the environment but also an understanding of the combination of the behavioral and structural paradigms. The dominant approach emphasizes the physical event and the decision-making processes, while the behavioral approach places its emphasis on the political, social, and economic situation of a society. A new paradigm is needed that views the behavioral approach as a function of the structural approach. In some situations the adjustments prescribed by the behavioral approach may be the best method to reduce vulnerability; however, social, economic or political constraints may exist and not allow for certain adjustments to be implemented. Mitchell (1990) has noticed this conceptual gap and suggests a 'structuration theory' as a bridge.
The study of volcanic hazards may be one area where the structuration theory would be applicable. A majority of the earth’s volcanoes are found in Third-World countries and according to Chester (1993) 86 percent of volcano-related deaths have occurred in LDC's. The behavioral approach could be employed because of its ability to aid in prediction, which can then be used to warn both rich and poor alike and effectively reduce exposure and vulnerability. Often times the adjustments prescribed by the behavioral approach would be the most effective response to a volcanic hazard; unfortunately, many hazard researchers take a structural approach and focus primarily on eruptions that occur in LDC's and cause significant damage to an already marginalized population. A structuration theory could be used for exchange of knowledge and technology between the MDC's and the LDC's. This exchange could help the LDC's make the necessary adjustments to modify their levels of vulnerability. The conceptual gap is bridged when the MDC's assist the LDC's in making the necessary adjustments that will decrease their exposure. It is here that my interests in volcanic hazards begin to develop.
My research interests lie in the study of volcanic hazards, and more specifically urbanization in volcanic landscapes. By 2025 it is expected that over 80 percent of the worlds population will reside in Third-World countries (Chester et al. 2001). This trend will certainly lead to increased vulnerability and higher potential for loss. The gap between behavioral and structural approaches needs to be closed quickly. While it is true that geologists, geochemists and geophysicists have dominated the field of volcanic hazards in the past through investigations of the physical processes that create the event, geography finds its place within the study by asking the questions of risk and vulnerability. Who is at risk and how? What types of hazards are people vulnerable to and why? What kind of options do they have and what kind of adjustments can be made? It is my intention to look at the adjustments that humans can make such as warning systems, land use, changing perceptions and modifying the hazard. I also intend to examine how the dependence on volcanic soil for agricultural use has increased vulnerability of marginalized agrarian societies. Lastly, I hope to answer the question of why people live in volcanic areas.
The study of volcanic hazards also falls under the umbrella of geography simply by looking at the spatial distribution of volcanoes around the world. Also, an explosion of medium intensity has the potential to affect locations circling the globe. Lastly, an investigation of hazards using the structural and behavioral paradigms and examining the physical processes and human actions follows the tradition developed by North American geographers.
The study of natural hazards is done best by geographers. There does not exist another discipline that can take the empirical studies of the physical world and apply them to the subjective theories of the social sciences. My research falls into geography by following the traditions of environmental determinist geographers and Marxist geographers and then combining them with the disciplines of geophysical sciences. My research is geography because I am a geographer and this is what I do.
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