Natural disaster

For other uses, see Natural disaster (disambiguation).

Economic loss risk for six natural disasters: tropical cyclones, droughts, earthquakes, floods, landslides, and volcanoes.

A natural disaster is the very harmful impact on a society or community after a natural hazard event. Some examples of natural hazard events include avalanches, droughts, earthquakes, floods, heat waves, landslides, tropical cyclones, volcanic activity and wildfires.[1] Additional natural hazards include blizzards, dust storms, firestorms, hails, ice storms, sinkholes, thunderstorms, tornadoes and tsunamis.[1] A natural disaster can cause loss of life or damage property. It typically causes economic damage. How bad the damage is depends on how well people are prepared for disasters and how strong the buildings, roads, and other structures are.[2] Scholars have been saying that the term natural disaster is unsuitable and should be abandoned.[3] Instead, the simpler term disaster could be used. At the same time the type of hazard would be specified.[4][5][6] A disaster happens when a natural or human-made hazard impacts a vulnerable community. It results from the combination of the hazard and the exposure of a vulnerable society.

Nowadays it is hard to distinguish between natural and human-made disasters.[3][7][8] The term natural disaster was already challenged in 1976.[6] Human choices in architecture,[9] fire risk,[10][11] and resource management[12] can cause or worsen natural disasters. Climate change also affects how often disasters due to extreme weather hazards happen. These "climate hazards" are floods, heat waves, wildfires, tropical cyclones, and the like.[13]

Some things can make natural disasters worse. Examples are inadequate building norms, marginalization of people and poor choices on land use planning.[3] Many developing countries do not have proper disaster risk reduction systems.[14] This makes them more vulnerable to natural disasters than high income countries. An adverse event only becomes a disaster if it occurs in an area with a vulnerable population.[15][16]

  1. ^ a b "Natural Hazards | National Risk Index". hazards.fema.gov. FEMA. Retrieved 2022-06-08.
  2. ^ G. Bankoff; G. Frerks; D. Hilhorst, eds. (2003). Mapping Vulnerability: Disasters, Development and People. Routledge. ISBN 1-85383-964-7.[page needed]
  3. ^ a b c "Why natural disasters aren't all that natural". openDemocracy. 2020-11-26. Archived from the original on 2020-11-29. Retrieved 2020-12-29.
  4. ^ Cite error: The named reference :4 was invoked but never defined (see the help page).
  5. ^ Cannon, Terry. (1994). Vulnerability Analysis and The Explanation Of 'Natural' Disasters. Disasters, Development and Environment.
  6. ^ a b Cite error: The named reference :2 was invoked but never defined (see the help page).
  7. ^ Gould, Kevin A.; Garcia, M. Magdalena; Remes, Jacob A.C. (1 December 2016). "Beyond 'natural-disasters-are-not-natural': the work of state and nature after the 2010 earthquake in Chile". Journal of Political Ecology. 23 (1): 93. doi:10.2458/v23i1.20181.
  8. ^ Smith, Neil (2006-06-11). "There's No Such Thing as a Natural Disaster". Items. Archived from the original on 2021-01-22. Retrieved 2020-12-29.
  9. ^ Coburn, Andrew W.; Spence, Robin JS; Pomonis, Antonios (1992). "Factors determining human casualty levels in earthquakes: mortality prediction in building collapse" (PDF). Proceedings of the tenth world conference on earthquake engineering. Vol. 10. pp. 5989–5994. ISBN 978-90-5410-060-7. Archived (PDF) from the original on 2020-11-12. Retrieved 2020-12-29.
  10. ^ "Wildfire Causes and Evaluations (U.S. National Park Service)". NPS.gov Homepage (U.S. National Park Service). 2018-11-27. Archived from the original on 2021-01-01. Retrieved 2020-12-29.
  11. ^ DeWeerdt, Sarah (2020-09-15). "Humans cause 96% of wildfires that threaten homes in the U.S." Anthropocene. Archived from the original on 2020-12-10. Retrieved 2020-12-29.
  12. ^ Smil, Vaclav (18 December 1999). "China's great famine: 40 years later". BMJ. 319 (7225): 1619–1621. doi:10.1136/bmj.319.7225.1619. PMC 1127087. PMID 10600969.
  13. ^ McGuire, Bill (2012). Waking the Giant: How a changing climate triggers earthquakes, tsunamis, and volcanoes. Oxford University Press. ISBN 978-0-19-959226-5. Archived from the original on 2022-04-18. Retrieved 2020-12-29.[page needed]
  14. ^ Zorn, Matija (2018), Pelc, Stanko; Koderman, Miha (eds.), "Natural Disasters and Less Developed Countries", Nature, Tourism and Ethnicity as Drivers of (De)Marginalization: Insights to Marginality from Perspective of Sustainability and Development, Perspectives on Geographical Marginality, vol. 3, Cham: Springer International Publishing, pp. 59–78, doi:10.1007/978-3-319-59002-8_4, ISBN 978-3-319-59002-8, retrieved 2022-06-08
  15. ^ D. Alexander (2002). Principles of Emergency planning and Management. Harpended: Terra publishing. ISBN 1-903544-10-6.
  16. ^ B. Wisner; P. Blaikie; T. Cannon & I. Davis (2004). At Risk – Natural hazards, people's vulnerability and disasters. Wiltshire: Routledge. ISBN 0-415-25216-4.[page needed]