Geoscience Reference
In-Depth Information
trade-offs between environmental quality, ecosystem resilience and human needs.
For example dams and levees were long considered a lynch pin of fl ood protection
measures. But now with greater understanding of dynamic geomorphological and
hydrological processes and their ecological signifi cance (e.g., Graf, 2005), river
engineering works have become less popular than they were. The United Kingdom's
'making space for water' fl ood risk management strategy is an important example
of at least the realisation of the need to move beyond river engineering (DEFRA,
2005).
For the most part, however, this scientifi c capacity to quantify and model envi-
ronmental hazards is still predominantly (mis)used to inform engineering and other
physical interventions designed to prevent the occurrence or mitigate the physical
effects of environmental hazards. For instance, levee systems and dams have been
designed to prevent fl uvial fl ooding, sea walls to prevent coastal fl ooding, and
improved building design codes to enable buildings to withstand earthquakes as
well as hazard maps and concomitant differential insurance rates to identify differ-
ent hazards zones. Such efforts to prevent the incidence of environmental hazards
can sometimes created new risks of their own. It was not the rain and wind from
Hurricane Katrina that fl ooded New Orleans but a catastrophic failure of the levee
system, which was designed to prevent localised fl ooding but encouraged rapid
urban development in areas of the city below sea level.
Increasing recognition of the limits of science and of the impossibility of absolute
technical control over the environment has helped foster new concerns about
hazards posed by the economic and productive activities of industrialised societies.
This new fi eld of technological risk developed in parallel with environmental
hazards research and has followed a similar intellectual trajectory. Most of the
initial work on the risks posed by industrial hazards like nuclear power and chemi-
cal contamination was predicated upon a fi rm belief in the possibility of their sci-
entifi c predictability and technical control. But as with research on natural and
environmental hazards, work on technological hazards has moved beyond narrow
scientism. There is now widespread recognition of the central importance of public
perceptions and behaviour and increasing awareness of the intellectual resources
available for hazards research from the political economic and post-structuralist
traditions of analysis.
Hazards Perception and Behavioural Research
Despite the expenditure of billions of dollars in civil works to defend against envi-
ronmental hazards, monetary losses, if not fatalities (at least in the industrialised
North), have continued to increase (Burton et al., 1993, Tobin and Montz, 1997).
The apparent failure of engineering and other technological approaches aimed at
reducing hazard risk gave rise to new behaviourist approaches within hazards
research and policy. The fi rst behaviourists were mavericks. In contrast to the pre-
dominant scientifi c concern with the frequency and magnitude of environmental
hazards, they instead emphasised the importance of public perceptions and behav-
iour in determining exposure and vulnerability to them.
The foundations of the behavioural approach were laid by Gilbert White's (1945)
study of fl ood hazard in the United States. He argued that by focusing exclusively
on engineering solutions to fl ooding, Americans were ignoring a range of other less
capital intensive and potentially more effective measures for dealing with fl ood
