Why many researchers say there is no such thing as a natural disaster
An earthquake in an empty desert harms nobody. It becomes a disaster only when it strikes people living in weak buildings with little preparation. Since at least 1976, critics have argued the word natural hides the human choices behind the damage, and the death toll from such events has fallen by three quarters in a century.
Emergency planners draw a sharp line between a hazard and a disaster. The US Federal Emergency Management Agency describes a hazard as the threat of a harmful event, and a disaster as the damage that follows when one actually hits a community hard. The ground shaking under San Francisco in 1906 was the hazard; the ruined city was the disaster. FEMA's national risk index tracks eighteen hazards, from avalanches and cold waves to lightning, tsunamis and wildfires. Some strike with almost no warning, such as tornadoes and flash floods, while drought can creep in over years.
The scale of damage depends heavily on human decisions: building codes, where towns are allowed to spread, how resources are managed, and whether warning and response systems exist. That is why death rates are highest in poorer countries with fragile construction and thin medical services. Critics argue that calling such losses natural makes them sound inevitable and blurs who is responsible for prevention, insurance and compensation. Hazards will always happen, they say, but their toll on society is not fixed. Their proposal is to drop the adjective and simply say disaster, naming the type of hazard involved.
The long-term trend supports them. Over the past hundred years, global deaths from these events fell by about 75 percent thanks to development, preparedness, education and international aid. Because the world's population grew enormously in that time, the risk to any individual has shrunk to roughly 6 percent of its former level. Money tells a different story: economic losses from weather, climate and water events rose sevenfold between the 1970s and the 2010s, driven largely by more people and more property in harm's way.
Some consequences are easy to overlook. Japan's 2011 tsunami left an estimated 5 million tonnes of debris, and plastic and foam from it later washed up on North American shores, multiplying litter on the US west coast tenfold. In the Asia-Pacific region, a person is five times as likely to be hit by a disaster as someone elsewhere.
Source: Natural disaster
