Is there such thing as a natural disaster?

I recently came across the proposition, accepted by most environmental geographers, that there is no such thing as a natural disaster. This proposition is largely based on the view that a natural hazard only becomes a disaster as a result of human exposure, vulnerability and poor management. 

In order to form my own opinion about this topic, I decided I must first find what a disaster is considered to be. The obvious condition for an event to be considered a disaster is deaths, and the Bradford disaster scale does rank the magnitude of a disaster by the number of deaths. However, Horlick-Jones and Peters point out that fatalities are only one aspect of a disaster, and they are not a necessary condition. This leads to the definition put forward in 1990 by FEMA: "an occurrence that has resulted in property damage, deaths, and/or injuries to a community." But this begs the question of how severe the damage or how numerous the casualties must be. Multiple different sources agree that an event can be considered a disaster when the impact upon the people or area leads to external assistance being needed for the society to cope. 

This definition suggests that whether a natural hazard becomes a disaster is determined by societies themselves because their level of susceptibility to harm, as well as effectiveness of response to it, determines whether they can cope without external assistance. 

The increased human exposure and vulnerability to natural hazards can be used to partly explain the increase in reported natural disasters in recent decades, shown by the graph below. Although some of the increase may be due to improved reporting and communications, it is thought that two-thirds of the increase is actually due to a rise in the number of natural disasters.

Due to the recent growths in population and the economy, more people and more money are at risk. This is especially the case in urban areas with high population densities and economic assets, often growing too fast for safety regulations to keep up. 

Especially significant growths are those along the coastline and on floodplains, which cause more people and infrastructure to be at risk from natural hazards such as floods and tsunamis. The number of people and total GDP exposed to flooding alone increased by 28% and 98% respectively from 1990-2007. Coastline development can also lead to the depletion of mangrove forests, which provide natural protection from tsunamis by slowing their flow rate by up to 90%, thus increasing the exposure of the populations further. Floodplain development can increase the risk of flooding occurring due to factors such as increased surface run off. Similarly, the need for more land for farming and housing has led to deforestation, which can be a factor in creating hazards such as floods and landslides. 

Another explanation for the rise in the number of natural disasters is global warming, attributed to human action, increasing the number of natural hazards such as hurricanes, floods and droughts. 

The decline in the past decade in the number of natural disasters is thought to be due to the improvement in preparedness for and response to natural hazards. The impact of this can be shown by the different impacts of Hurricane Ivan in 2004. When it hit Florida and Grenada, 27 and 100 people died respectively. However, when it hit Cuba, which has many different policies that reduce the threat of hurricanes, there were no deaths. In 1976, an earthquake killed 23,000 people in Guatemala. The majority of these deaths were not the direct result of the earthquake, but occurred in the days that followed due to aid not being sent to affected and needy people.

Therefore, natural hazards become disasters due to the presence of humans and their infrastructure in affected areas as well as insufficient preparation and response by humans. Humans can also create hazards that may become disasters, or increase the risk of them occurring. The impact of human actions leading to the creation of a natural disaster is shown by the disaster risk equation:

Based upon the points above, I would suggest that humans have influence upon all three factors that lead to a disaster occurring and thus there is no such thing as a 'natural' disaster.

However, there is some logic in this argument that I find hard to grasp. Since humans are animals and animals are components of nature, does this mean that humans are components of nature? If so, the argument that natural disasters are not natural because humans are present in an area affected by a natural hazard seems invalid. I can see that a rebuttal to this could be that it is the human infrastructure that is not natural. This I do not entirely accept either. Our infrastructure is created from natural components and the desire to want shelter and comfort is natural. If our infrastructure is not natural, surely this means that termite nests and bee hives are not natural either. Using this thought process, my conclusion would be that there is such thing as a natural disaster but they would not be disasters without the presence or influence of humans. 

Ella Witts