Geoscience Reference
In-Depth Information
a globally extended network of actors, they demonstrate the inadequacies of global
health governance in relation to the spread of SARS. Collins (2001) examines the
traditional concerns of political ecologists - land degradation - in relation to (adverse)
health outcomes. He suggests that policy responses to the sustainability problem
should take both human and environmental health into account simultaneously.
While Mayer (1996) restricts his focus to the implications of disequilibrium for
new and remerging infectious diseases, the framework can be applied to health,
broadly defi ned. Richmond et al. (2005) develop this potential with a fi ne-grained
political ecological study of linkages between the economic marginalisation of
members of the 'Nangis First Nation in British Columbia as a result of commercial
aquaculture, and consequent constraints on cultural and social activities related to
health and well-being. Elsewhere in geography, the political ecology framework is
being robustly applied to understand a range of health outcomes within the vulner-
ability approach to natural hazards.
Vulnerability Analyses
Hazards geographers investigate the adverse outcomes (including health) of the
intersection between environment (natural and technological) and humans. Early
work in this vein tended to focus on describing the spatial distribution and historical
frequency of hazard occurrence, and then quantifying hazard impacts in terms of
population sensitivity (Burton et al., 1978; Kates and Kasperson, 1983; Palm, 1990).
Over the past two decades, the hazards literature has been moving towards a vul-
nerability approach that seeks to understand environmental and human factors that
underlie differential exposure to hazards, population sensitivity to these exposures
and resilience after a hazard event has occurred (Hewitt, 1983; Blaikie et al., 1994,
Bohle et al., 1994; Cutter, 1996; Cutter, 2003). Thus, vulnerability arises from
within the linked human-environment system.
The concept of vulnerability has ties to political ecology in its attention to how
disruptions of the dynamic equilibrium of ecosystems (including the human com-
ponent) intersect with societal constructions of risk (Oliver-Smith, 1996). Vulnera-
bility approaches to hazards research seek to understand how disparities in resource
endowments and entitlements underlie the differential exposure of people and places
to hazards and their consequences, as well as their predisposition to future hazard
risk (Sen, 1981; Blaikie, et al., 1994; Cutter et al. 2000; Turner et al., 2003). Within
the vulnerability framework, place is where population health is compromised and
where responses occur in terms of disaster relief and healthcare. At the same time,
vulnerability analyses are also highly cognizant of scale, with attention to uneven
local impacts of events occurring at diverse spatial and temporal scales.
Useful insights stemming from vulnerability analysis include problematising
exposure to environmental stressors, population sensitivity to these stressors and
population resilience in recovering from harmful exposures as well as sensitivity to
future environmental stressors. Exposure, sensitivity and resilience differ over space
and time, with local conditions affected by agents operating outside the local system
and at larger scales. Environmental exposures may be acute or cumulative, ongoing
or intermittent. Subtle shifts in the human-environment equilibrium (including reac-
tive disaster mitigation responses) can lead to large-scale impacts later in time, or
outside of the locale where major environmental disruption is occurring (Turner
et al., 2003, Ingram et al., 2006).
