Fall 2018: Natural Hazards and Disasters
Natural Hazards and Disasters
Class 1: Introduction to the Course and Basic ConceptsCONTENTS
PRACTICALITIESThe main communication tool for this class is the web page at http://www.mari-odu.org/acdemics/2018f_diasters. The main page informs about requirements, work skills, grading, and the grade forgiveness policy. A separate page is available for all legalities. The class schedule is the page where all notes, dates, date lines and assignments will be published. This page also gives access to the individual class and lab pages, which serve as a kind of script. The Get Woke - Stay Woke page is the place where all of you will contribute to the classes and labs. Your presence in the classes and labs will be documented through the submission of 4+4 forms, which can only be submitted during the classes and labs. You will submit separate forms for classes and labs. In theses forms, you will tell me two things you learned and two things you did not understand in the class or in the lab. This will help me to make sure that things I did not explain well enough can be discussed again in the next class/lab. In the 4+4 Forms for the classes, you will also identify two aspects of what was discussed in the class that you think are working very well and two things that you consider as a challenge or unsolved. For the labs, you can leave these fields empty. Active participation in the class is important. The 4+4 Form is one avenue for this. The Get Woke - Stay Woke page provides more tools for active contributions. When you consider something important, you can “Pin It”. The statements you pin are visible to everybody and others can comment on them. I will use your pinned statements to compile key points of the classes and may comment on them. If you have questions related to natural hazards and how humanity is handling the disaster risk, you can “Ask It”. Your questions will be visible to all in the class, and all will be able to try to respond to your questions. I will moderate the deliberations and comment where necessary. I am working on adding more tools to this page. We'll see how this evolves through the course of the class. To access the Get Woke — Stay Woke page, you use your email. The first time you access the page, you will have to enter a password, which you will then have to use whenever you return. If you forget your password, please let me know and I will have to reset it. Note that all assignement will have to be sent to me by email. I will return the assignments with my comments to you. Please, make sure that you read these comments and take them into account for future assignment. The points you get for each assignment will be made available in Blackboard. COURSE CONTENTSHumanity is embedded in, and interacts with, the Earth's life-support system (ELSS) (Griggs et al., 2013, Pearce, 2010). The ELSS provides the basis for the welfare of all human and non-human communities, and these communities are adapted to prevailing conditions. Hazardous events can change these conditions and cause damage to the communities, with the impacts ranging from local, individual to global scale. For humans, reducing disasters caused by hazards is a goal and a necessity to improve sustainability of human communities. Disaster reduction, or better, Disaster Risk Governance (DRG), requires a thorough understanding of the hazards that can occur, the probability of them occurring, and the processes that can lead to disastrous impacts on human and non-human communities. Although the class is titled “Natural hazards and disasters,” it needs to be emphasized that the distinction between natural and anthropogenic hazards is somewhat arbitrary. It would work if humans were in a spaceship and Earth was free of humans. Humanity is an integral part of the ELSS and is modifying the ELSS at a very significant level, and this leads to many hazards that seem to be “natural” but are actually to some extent caused or amplified by humans. The boundary between hazards of non-human and human origin is blurred. Technological hazards can be triggered by non-technological hazards. Human activity can trigger hazards or change the spectrum of hazards in terms of frequency and magnitude. Human activity can also lead to the ELSS crossing thresholds and entering new states with significantly different characteristics and mal-adaptation. The interdependency of human and non-human hazards will be discussed in detail. Hazards and disasters are linked by processes in the exposed community and its environment that are triggered by a hazardous event. These processes depend on how the community is organized and developed, and the same hazardous event can lead to a wide range of disasters depending on the exposed community's preparedness and adaptation. Understanding the processes that link hazards and disasters is a prerequisite for DRG. The class will analyze these processes based on case studies. First, we will briefly introduce the ELSS as the basic conceptual model for sustainability. We will then introduce core concepts and terminology, including hazard, vulnerability, disaster, threshold, resilience, etc. International efforts to address disaster risks including the Sendai Framework and the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) will be briefly mentioned at the beginning of the course, and we will come back to them at the end. The main part of the course will focus on the different natural hazards and the impact they have on humanity. We will also discuss towards the end of the class how humanity it interfering with natural hazards and in some cases amplifying them. The Earth’s Life-Support System and SustainabilityA sustainable development is a development that “meets the needs of the present, while safe-guarding the Earth’s life-support system, on which the welfare of current and future generations [of human and non-human animals] depends” (Griggs et al., 2013). Human (and non-human) communities are embedded in the ELSS and interact with the ELSS through flows. For modern human societies, the flows are part of the economic system and controlled by ethical, moral and economic rules. Over the last 200 years and particularly the last 70 years, most of the flows between the ELSS and humanity have increased by several orders of magnitude and new flows have been created. This has impacted the physiology of the ELSS and threatens the sustainability of modern society. Sustainability is an emerging characteristic of a dynamic system; it is not built into a system by design. It characterizes the ability to maintained the relationships in the system and function continuously. What systems are we referring to? We consider biological, social and economic systems, communities, including whatever technical support the community may have developed. The term “sustainability” is a neutral term and is neither positive nor negative. Applied to society and society's relationship to the Earth's life-support system sustainability needs to be attached to a value system. This also applies to how we handle risk and an active value system is a fundamental incredience to DRG. We will discuss the ethics of DRG and how it relates to the relationship between human communities and the ELSS. Important for DRG is the perception of risk. Realizing that risk perception is a social construct, we have to ask how this social construct is created. The role of cognitive biases at the individual and community level will be an important aspect to consider. While science can inform us about the hazards and the likelihood of hazardous events occuring and engineering can help to understand how the built environment is going to respond to hazardous events, and while social science creeates knowledge about how the social fabric reacts to these events, DRG also depends on our interpretation of evidence and our decision making. Thus, understanding the link between hazards and disasters requires also an understanding of human perception and decision making. In the interaction with the ELSS, humans have to make choices about where to settle, how to develop communities and the built environment, how to meet the needs of human communities, and how to prepare for hazardous events. Many of these choices benefit from a risk-based decision-making. For many of the non-human hazards, we cannot change very much the likelihood of the hazard, but we can impact vulnerability and exposure of human communities. Hazards, Vulnerabilities, and DisastersIt is important to distingush between hazardous events and the resulting disasters, and to realize the relevance of the processes that link hazards and disasters. The societal goal of reducing disaster risks requires a deep understanding of the processes that lead to a disaster as a consequence of a hazardous event. HazardsDefinition: A hazard is a change of the system state that can lead to system degradation and/or a reduction of the system's capability to function. A hazard can be a short event (e.g., an earthquake), a longer process (e.g., extinction), or a slow trend (e.g., sea level rise). A hazard can lead to long-term impacts that reduce the sustainability of the system. We distinguish:
The class will introduce these hazards and discuss their direct and indirect relevance for human and non-human communities. The boundary between non-human and human hazards is blured and increasingly, non-human hazards are modified or amplified by human action. Hazards in the Earth system have a wide range of origins. For risk assessments, it is fundamental to understand how likely the occurence of a hazardous event of a certain type and magnitude is. A widely accepted concept for the characterization of a hazard is the probability density function (PDF). The PDF for different hazard types vary widely. Particularly the low-probability end of the hazard spectrum can show very wide variations for different hazards. The potential impact of a hazard as function of its recurrence frequency or time is also helpful for the characterization of a hazard, although the actual impact on communities depends on where the hazard occures in space (and sometimes time) relative to the exposed community. Low-probability, high-impact events, particularly those that are outside our normal experience, are difficult to assess and prepare for, leading to a wide range of views on the risk. VulnerabilitiesDefinition: Vulnerability is the inability of a system to withstand the effects of a hostile environment. Vulnerability is a system characteristic that is not depending on a hazard actually occuring. For example, a building may be vulnerable to shaking of a certain type and magnitude, independent of this shaking actually occuring. Thus, a building may be vulnerable to earthquakes of a certain intensity independent of an earthquake actually occuring at the location where the building is located. If it is located in a geographical area that does not experience earthquakes, this vulnerability does not lead to a risk. However, if the building is located in a seismicly highly active area, this vulnerability leads to a high risk. The term vulnerability as defined above is mainly used applied to the built environment and the non-human environment. In social sciences, “social vulnerability” describes the extent to which a community could be affected by stress, changes or hazardous events. DisastersDefinition: A disaster is the loss of lives and property; often as the result of a hazardous event. Hazardous events that impact a system trigger processes in this system and these processes determine to what extent the combination of a particular hazard and a particular system will lead to a disaster. These processes depend on the vulnerability of the system to the particular hazard, and the ability of the system to function through the disturbance and to recover from the damages. For human communities both the design of the built environment and the social capital of the human fabric determined the processes a particular hazard will trigger and the extent of the disaster this causes. Thus, while there are natural, non-anthropogenic hazards, the extent of the disaster caused by these hazards are to a large extent determined by humans. Therefore, we do not speak of “natural hazards.” Concerning the extent of disaster, we follow Plag et al. (2015) and classify large event as:
Concept of RiskDefinition: Risk is the potential for consequences where something of value is at stake and where the outcome is uncertain. In general, risk means the possibility of loss, including injury. There are many different ways to quantify risk. We will use the product of hazard probability, vulnerability, and value of exposed assets as a quantitative measure of risk expressed in $. Risk is a useful concept for assessing the relevance of hazards, and for a comprehensive risk assessment, the full ”Probability Density Function“ (PDF) of the hazard needs to be considered. The concept of DRG captures this. Disaster risk assessments are an important tool to guide community actions to reduce or govern the risk. However, public and governmental support for DRG depends on risk awareness, which is determined by individual, community, country and cultural biases. In modern societies, the media play an important role for the development of, as well as the biases in, risk awareness. There are fundamental challenges in understanding and communicating risk. The importance of complex interactions in shaping risks is often overlooked. The need for rigerous expert judgement in evaluating risks is not sufficiently acknowledged. The centrality of values, perceptions, and goals in determining both risks and risk governance is not adequately built into risk assessments. A particularly challenging issue is how to account for low-probability, high-impact hazards in the long-tail of the hazard's PDF. “Successful risk assessment requires thinking 'oustide of the box' to avoid failure of imagination, but this is a skill rarely found at the levels of government and global corporations” (Spratt and Dunlop, 2018). In general, risks associated with extreme events are very often severely underestimated. Deliberations of existential risks to human civilization are often very polarized and the role of science in these deliberations is criticized. ThresholdsDefinition: In a system, a threshold is a tipping point at which a relatively small change or disturbance causes a rapid change in the system. A tipping point may be understood as the passing of a critical threshold in an Earth system component (including ecosystems of human and non-human animals), which produces a step change in the system state. A challenge with thresholds is that they are often hidden and are crossed long before it is realized. The threshold is not where the boat goes over the edge of a weater fall, it is far up the river, when the people in the boat lose the option to get to the shore. ResilienceDefinition: Resilience is the capacity of a system, be it an individual, a forest, a city or an economy, to deal with change and continue to develop. The definition is that of the Stockholm Resilience Centre. With this definition, resilience is about how human and non-human systems can use shocks and disturbances like a financial crisis, climate change, or a hurricane to spur renewal and innovative thinking. There are many other definitions. For instance, the Oxford English Dictionary (1973) states “Resilience is the act of rebounding or springing back.” “Resilience is the capacity of a system to absorb disturbance and still retain its basic function and structure” (Walker and Salt, 2006). “Resilient systems bend under stress but do not break, so they are able to weather storms more effectively and recover more quickly. Adaptive systems are characterized by redundancy, diversity, efficiency, strength, interdependence, adaptability, and collaborativeness (Godschalk 2003). They are designed so that the failure of one part does not cause the whole system to collapse” (Walbert et al., 2012). “I want to reserve resilience to refer to the broader capability – how well can a system handle disruptions and variations that fall outside of the base mechanisms/model for being adaptive as defined in that system” (Hollnagel, 2006). “However, we would argue that we should extend the definition a little more broadly, in order to encompass also the ability to avert the disaster or major upset, using these same characteristics. Resilience then describes also the characteristic of managing the organisation’s activities to anticipate and circumvent threats to its existence and primary goals. This is shown in particular in an ability to manage severe pressures and conflicts between safety and the primary production or performance goals of the organisation” (Hale and Heijer, 2006). Disasters and SustainabilityDisasters affecting human communities constitute often severe disruptions and can reduce the sustainability of the community or render the community totally unsustainable. Therefore, our efforts to make progress towards sustainable development have to address disaster risk. There are two main programs at global level that focus on DRG. One of them is the Sendai Framework for Disaster Risk Reduction 2015-2030 (UNISDR, 2015). This framework was adopted at the Third UN World Conference on Disaster Risk Reduction in Sendai, Japan, on March 18, 2015. It aims to achieve a substantial reduction of disaster risk and losses in lives, livelihoods and health and in the economic, physical, social, cultural and environmental assets of persons, businesses, communities and countries over the next 15 years. It outlines seven clear targets and four priorities for action to prevent new and reduce existing disaster risks: (i) Understanding disaster risk; (ii) Strengthening disaster risk governance to manage disaster risk; (iii) Investing in disaster reduction for resilience and; (iv) Enhancing disaster preparedness for effective response, and to “Build Back Better” in recovery, rehabilitation and reconstruction. The other program at global level is the United Nations 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development (United Nations, 2015) with the seventeen Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). An important impediment to sustainability are disasters disrupting communities. The SDG 11 focusses on “Sustainable Cities and Communities” and aims to “Make cities and human settlements inclusive, safe, resilient and sustainable.” Each SDG comes with a number of targets, and several of the SDG 11 Targets directly relate to disaster risk:
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