Geoscience Reference
In-Depth Information
Chapter 27
Natural Hazards
Daanish Mustafa
The Naturalness of Natural Hazards
The term 'natural hazards' refers to the potential, experience, and aftermath of
environmental extremes such as earthquakes, volcanic activity, drought, storms and
other extreme weather. As such, hazards are different from the term 'natural disas-
ters', which refers only to the actual extreme event. By contrast the hazards perspec-
tive takes a longer-term view of adverse environmental extremes as integral to
interactions between humans and their environments. Earthquakes, followed by
fl oods and tropical cyclones, have been the most expensive and lethal hazards faced
by humanity during the 20th century (Tobin and Montz, 1997). While there is
clearly a geography to those particular hazards, the fact is that environmental
extremes of one sort or another affect every square inch of planet Earth, though
clearly what constitutes an extreme and how it comes to infl uence human affairs
will vary enormously from one context to another. There were and continue to be
very sound political, economic and cultural reasons for human habitation of various,
apparently hazardous, environments (Burton et al., 1993). Flood plains, for example,
may be more exposed to fl ooding but they also tend to have the most fertile soils.
The hazards perspective developed by geographers and other scholars helps us
appreciate how, why, and with what effects people adapt to the opportunities and
perils offered by their environments.
Natural hazards are more appropriately called environmental hazards. Indeed,
as we shall see many of the insights developed by geographers studying environ-
mental hazards have also been successfully applied to understanding how societies
deal with technological hazards, like nuclear accidents. Calling some hazards
'natural' implies that some uncontrollable Act of God or other external cause (aka
Mother Nature) is responsible for the damage and suffering they cause. It ignores
the role of social processes in infl uencing the frequency, degree of exposure, result-
ing consequences, and ability to resist or recover from a given environmental
extreme. The reality is that there is nothing more typical than environmental vari-
ability - the issue for human societies is how we cope with it. One of the central
