In the last 50 years the financial losses from natural disasters have increased exponentially. David Etkin is a natural hazards and risk analyst with Environment Canada, who was recently invited by The Institute for Environmental Studies to speak on “Natural disasters: root causes of vulnerability.”
There is a growing concern in developing nations where the economic costs and the lives lost to natural disasters both seem to be on the rise. The major natural disasters include floods, volcano eruptions, and earthquakes.
Whereas many people in developing countries have no choice as to where or how they live, the core question puzzling Etkin is: “why, where there is not a lack of choice or knowledge, do we make ourselves vulnerable?”
The answers do not lie out in the natural world but rather deep down within human behaviour. To explain how humans perceive and react to risk in their lives Etkin gave the example of the introduction of the anti lock-break system (ABS) by a particular company into their taxis.
At first ABS breaks were added to half of the taxis at random so that no driver knew if they were driving the taxi with the extra feature. The number of accidents decreased. The company then changed it so that each driver knew if their taxi had the ABS breaks. “The accident rate immediately rose to where it was. A safety feature was transformed into a performance feature,” explains Etkin, since those drivers who knew they had the ABS breaks felt comfortable driving faster.
Etkin’s message is that a blind reliance on technology, such as believing dykes will save a city from flooding indefinitely, is an illogical assessment of risk. In fact, “reliance upon technology increases the scale of a disaster when system failure occurs,” Etkin explains.
The problem is a combination of tendencies among most people to underestimate the chances of a serious disaster happening to them and to ignore the potential for long-term risk even when it is apparent.
These negative human reactions manifested in an experiment conducted by Rocky Lopes of the International Red Cross, in which he gave the same presentation on natural disasters to two different audiences, but only showing images of disasters in one. The odd result was that when the images were used, far fewer people left the presentation believing the events could happen to them and even fewer said they would take action to prevent them.
This counterintuitive result is because people react in one of two non-productive ways, where, Etkin explains, they either “reduce anxiety by denying it because the problem is so horrible, or they make the problem seem so small [that it can be safely ignored].”
The goal is to find a balance so that people neither feel useless nor ambivalent. Etkin explains that people “need to feel empowered…they need to feel they have some control over their fate.”
A balance in society and government is also necessary for dealing with vulnerable communities and those at risk. While a libertarian society is important, the government, according to Etkin, must sometimes step in to ensure that overall safety and well being is being taken into account, such as if a company wants to build on property in a flood plain. To a major extent, risk is socially constructed, so that the main question becomes what values society places upon safety and mitigation.
