Unnatural hazards

Prologue: Naturalness

Disaster, as per the standard mantra, comes from hazard and vulnerability combining. Hazard is not a disaster by itself, because sometimes a hazard ends up as a disaster and sometimes it does not. The different outcomes emerge from vulnerability. Consequently, even when the hazard is from nature, the disaster is not from nature.

Avoiding the phrase "natural disaster(s)", due to this baseline that disasters are not natural, is long-standing within disaster research, policy, and practice. Instead, "unnatural disaster(s)" is often used (e.g., Abramovitz, 2001). The phrase "unnatural disaster(s)" is also applied to contrast disasters apparently not caused by nature - such as wars and mechanical failures - with "natural disasters" that are alleged to be caused by nature - such as hurricanes, tsunamis, and avalanches.

Given this ambiguity and since all disasters are "unnatural", the extra word "unnatural" is superfluous and confusing. They are all "disasters".

What does this situation mean for hazards? Hurricanes, tsunamis, and avalanches are referred to as "natural hazards". Without natural disasters, are there natural hazards?

Unnaturalness

Why use the phrase "natural hazards" rather than the simpler "hazards"? Is there any value in differentiating "natural hazards" from "unnatural hazards"?

Unnatural hazards have referred to "unsatisfactorily-controlled drying" for barleys (Pollock et al., 1955, p. 295) and "market fluctuations and potential organizational instability" (Lees, 1980, p. 375). The idea is to separate hazards from nature - such as hurricanes, tsunamis, and avalanches - and hazards from humanity. "Unsatisfactorily-controlled drying" indicates that drying could presumably be a natural hazard if the barley is outside. When the drying could be controlled inside and is not, then it becomes unnatural. Yet if the barley were left outside without any effort to control the temperature around it, then nature's phenomenon of heat has become hazardous due to human (in)action. The hazardousness is not entirely natural, even when the heat is entirely natural.

The earliest note found thus far (there must be earlier discussions) directly querying the naturalness of hazards in this context is Hewitt (1997, p. 68) writing "Many biological hazards have grown up with and are so closely adapted to human domesticates, artificial environments and economic activities that it seems misleading to call them 'natural' hazards." This reasoning applies to many other hazards.

The Unnaturalness of Many Hazards

The parameters of many hazards interacting with vulnerability are determined as much by human actions as by nature. Some examples:

· Droughts: Lack of water often results from water (over)use and (mis)management rather than from precipitation or flow variations (Glantz and Katz, 1977; Wilhite and Glantz, 1985).

· Floods including tsunamis: Engineering rivers and coastlines affects water depth, velocity, duration, debris, and wave parameters, among other properties (Criss and Shock, 2001; Etkin, 1999).

· Earthquakes: How infrastructure is placed, designed, and built affects the specific shaking parameters felt by specific components of that infrastructure (Spence and So, 2021).

· Vegetation fires: Land use, ecosystem management, and human ignitions influence fire regimes (Fusco et al., 2021), including frequency, intensity, duration, speed, direction of travel, and characteristics of smoke and embers.

· Landslides and avalanches: Vegetation management, infrastructure, and land use all change slide triggers and parameters (Highland and Bobrowsky, 2008).

· Weather: Human-caused climate change affects all weather (IPCC, 2021-2022).

Various hazards are influenced by urban development or lack thereof: air temperature (due to the urban heat island), wind speed and direction (due to wind tunnels), floods (through ponding and runoff), and dangerous animals and plants (often through extinction or creating environments amenable or not to them).

Human inaction determines the hazardousness of some natural phenomena. Plenty of options exist to nudge space objects such as comets and asteroids away from a collision course with the Earth. Humanity monitors these hazards to some extent, but not completely, not with enough lead-time to respond, and not with adequate response measures available. If the object does not come near the Earth, then it is not hazardous to our planet.

International Health Regulations aim to identify and contain microbial pathogens before they spread into an epidemic or a pandemic. Enacting, monitoring, and enforcing these regulations is not adequately funded or fully politically supported. Human inaction leads to infectious disease outbreaks. Explosive and effusive volcanic eruptions should not be stopped. Measures exist to reduce the hazardousness of specific phenomena, such as strengthening roofs to deal with tephra and evacuating people to deal with pyroclastic density currents and lava. These measures are often not enacted.

Overall, many phenomena from nature become hazardous due to human interventions or lack of interventions. The hazardousness is perhaps not from nature per se. Does the unnaturalness of hazards go deeper than simply altering hazard characteristics, such as air temperature and flood depth?

Is 'Hazard' Redundant?

The philosophical question "If a tree falls in a forest and no one is around, does it make a sound?" is attributed to many different origins. It seems to have entered into European disaster discussions when Rousseau (1756) wrote to Voltaire about Portugal's 1755 earthquake and tsunami, effectively asking, "If an earthquake happens in a forest and no one is around, does it make a disaster?" The contemporary answer is generally "no", as per the ethos of "no natural disasters".

A disaster is made by vulnerability. Without vulnerability, an earthquake cannot harm or damage. Consequently, the earthquake lacks hazardousness and cannot be a hazard. Without vulnerability, it is just an earthquake. That is, since disaster cannot exist without vulnerability, perhaps hazardousness cannot exist without vulnerability? "Hazard", being untranslatable into many languages and cultures, is possibly an abstruse, philosophical construct which does not exist on its own, only in relation to vulnerability existing.

Why include hazard in the disaster equation? The disaster is vulnerability; vulnerability is the disaster. A typical and regular variation in water levels can be hazardous and disastrous to people with high vulnerability. Water levels beyond any previous observation might hardly be noticed with low vulnerability, so there is no hazard.

The notion of "hazard" does not seem to be needed to understand disaster, as long as vulnerability is understood. With hazard being tangible only in the context of vulnerability, then hazardousness is created by society and all hazards are unnatural - if hazardousness exists at all.

If a tree falls in a forest and no one is around, it is not a disaster. If a tree falls on someone, it can be a disaster.

Epilogue: Beyond the Human Everyday

"No natural disasters" is not absolute, since some natural disasters are evident. They involve natural phenomena that are almost impossible for human beings to affect or to avoid (on Earth) while the vulnerability is planet-wide and so can barely be reduced, if at all. Examples are gamma ray bursts, flood basalts, Ice Ages, and mini black holes. These phenomena cause the disaster - a natural disaster - and these phenomena are entirely natural hazards.

At least, they are natural hazards and natural disasters to humanity. How much does nature care if a biotic entity such as a tree, an abiotic entity such as a river, an entire species, or an entire biome is destroyed by lava or by a supernova? Does nature experience or express the notions of hazard, vulnerability, and disaster? Perhaps nature's results from nature's phenomena are simply natural outcomes from natural realms. Querying and judging loss, damage, destructiveness, and disastrousness might be an entirely human construct.