N AT U R A L D I S A S T E R S Are natural disasters really natural? The hazards themselves in the form of floods, earthquakes, volcanoes and hurricanes certainly are. The disastrous consequences of these natural phenomena are not natural at all, far from it. We as human beings in our pursuit to prosper, are settling in areas that are exposed to these natural events, putting ourselves in harm’s way, physically, socially, and financially. Professor James Jackson at the Department of Earth Sciences coined the phrase the ‘Fatal Attraction’ (Jackson, 2016). Our ancestors chose to settle where there was easy access to water with fertile and flat lands, which happen to be the exact locations where active faults, in creating breakages in the earth’s crust, elevate groundwater. As we continue to urbanise, large settlements along important trade routes have evolved into megacities, housing hundreds of thousands of people, and in the case of Tehran in Iran, over nine million are at risk from an inevitable earthquake. The last major earthquake was in 1830. It is not just density of populations that aggravate consequences of natural hazards. We live in a global village where we and our neighbours in different countries are reliant on food, goods and services that travel thousands of miles before they reach our homes. We are therefore susceptible to naturally occurring events that are seemingly remote but now have major impacts on the global consumer and financial markets. A local flood just outside Bangkok in 2011 which hardly made mainstream news in the UK, brought the production of hard drives, cameras, and microchips to a standstill. A single facility in Bang Pa-In owned by Western Digital (Fig 1) produced one-quarter of the world’s supply of ‘sliders’, an integral part of hard-disk drives and halted global production for over two weeks.
Figure 1
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