Geography

ADPI

The Geography department is revelling in the emergence from the pandemic years and has wasted no time in making the most of getting back out in the field.

The view from the Sky Garden as seen by the Lower Eighth on their field trip to the City of London and Docklands in February 2022. The department has run field trips to study the ecology of Richmond Park, the redevelopment of Nine Elms, the evolution of the City of London and the Docklands as well as tracing the course of the River Mole in Surrey with plans to relaunch international trips later in 2022 and to run fieldtrips more widely in the UK. The Geography Society goes from strength to strength under a strong new leadership team and the oversight of Mr Goldup, talks and events have flourished involving some highly contested competitions and a huge variety of talks from the Geography of Surfing to the current state of European Food Security and is busily preparing for the next Geography Conference in October. This year the department is sad to say goodbye to Miss Johnson who has served the department so well and, as a true geographer, leaves us to relocate to South East Asia. ❚

Global Food Security

Rob Wight

Food security has long been an issue in the world. Every day we hear stories about countries where disease, floods and droughts have caused crop failure en masse. Think of the 2012 Sudan Famine, the ongoing famine in Yemen, and the current Tigray Famine in Ethiopia. However, the war in Ukraine has the potential to cause great food insecurity, not just in Ukraine itself, but in the rest of the world, having possibly disastrous consequences for some nations.

Firstly, it is important to lay out what food security and, by extension, what food insecurity is. There are four aspects to food security. The first is access, which lays out the basic requirement that people should be able to access a sufficient amount of food, in both mass and in calories. The second aspect is that of reliability, which is the stability of the food supply. Is the supply weather dependent? Does the price fluctuate in and out of a person’s purchasing power? These are all things which must be considered when assessing food security. Thirdly is safety – is the food safe to eat? Has it been stored and grown properly? The final aspect of food security is nutrition. It’s no use having access to enough food if it doesn’t provide you with the nutrients which you need to live an active and healthy life. From these we can take the definition of food security – ‘To have reliable access to safe, nutritious food for an active and healthy life’’.

So how can the conflict in Ukraine affect this, not just on a local, but a global scale? Well, the answer lies in a commodity many forget about in modern life, where we see not the commodity, but only its product. The problem lies in wheat. Ukraine produces around 80 million tonnes of grain per year. This production is expected to be around half of that this year due to the conflict. The World Food Programme (WFP) estimates that 13.5 million tons of wheat and 16 million tons of maize are frozen in Ukraine and Russia, which makes up 23 and 43 percent of exports in 21/22. In order to make up the lost calories, a population with a similar size to the UK would have to stop eating for 3 years. Between the two, Egypt, one of the world’s biggest importers of grain, due to their bread subsidy program, has already raised concerns. They claim they have enough wheat left to see the year out, but others are not so sure. The New York based food, climate and agricultural forecaster, Gro Intelligence, has suggested that the world has just 10 weeks left of wheat stockpiles. Although this does not account for the ongoing production in some areas, it is still a worrying statistic, when considering that if wheat production were to fail, we would run out in less than 3 months. The WFP has also stated that as supplies become limited and prices rise, they have already had to reduce rations for refugees and other vulnerable populations across East Africa and the Middle East. We are also seeing this in the UK, with the increased price of the commodity doing nothing to aid our ongoing cost of living crisis. Wheat is used in staples such as bread and pasta, and is thus affecting the people who do not have the extra to spend. On average, a white loaf (800g) of bread is costing 10p more, an increase of around 10%, according to census data.

So from what we can see, the Ukraine conflict is indeed posing a major threat to food security on many levels and across the globe. For some, such as those in the UK, it may be severely affecting their access to certain staples, as they can no longer afford such foods. However, in much of Arabia and North Africa, Egypt as an example, this conflict seriously threatens the reliability of their populations’ access to food. This could lead to far graver consequences, such as hunger, and mass unrest, or both. This would be a horrific consequence of an already desperately mournful situation in Ukraine, and must be avoided at all costs.

As this is an ongoing, fast moving and ever changing situation, the world as a whole and global and local organisations are battling with how to ensure that this does not result in an even greater global crisis. ❚

Who is Culpable for the 2018 Wildfire Tragedy in Mati, Greece?

Alexander Gong

The 23rd July 2018 is a day of immense importance for modern day Greece. As the sun started its retreat behind the Aegean sea, wildfires were scouring the Attica peninsula.

Just 30 kilometres from the ancient capital of Athens a small coastal town called Mati was devastated, killing 103 people. As the fire blazed throughout the night, the flags at the Berlaymont flew at half mast whilst the nation entered a three day period of mourning.

The immediate aftermath of the fire saw two prevailing emotions: Grief and anger. Whilst the former requires little explanation, the latter of these two observations is intriguing. The Greek people felt let down by their government, whose incompetence and mismanagement was highlighted as the reason for the Mati tragedy. Yet it seems counterintuitive to blame a natural disaster – something seemingly inexorable by its nature – on the government alone. Hence my EPQ focused on this question of blame and culpability. Were the Greek government truly to blame for the Mati wildfire or were critical factors outside of their control more significant?

To truly investigate where responsibility lies one must first be grounded in a basic understanding of blame theory. My research led me to two distinct methodologies which I could use to allocate blame, both of which fit under the umbrella of causal responsibility. The first of these methods is an allocation of blame through causation by omission. This is the concept that blame can and should be allocated when the absence of an expected action leads to adverse effects. In the case of Mati, there was a normative expectation for the government to provide sufficient safety measures for the town – a lack of which proved fatal for many. Moreover, I also explored the idea of moral responsibility. This is especially pertinent when allocating blame towards a governing body given the nature of political legislation. Laws are often passed in order to benefit one aspect of society at the expense of another. There is always an opportunity cost when making policy decisions as governments choose to prioritise certain endeavours. In 1998 there was a policy decision to focus on fire suppression rather than fire prevention in Greece. Such a decision proved to be a pivotal mistake and in numerous ways led to the disaster at Mati. However, the question remains as to whether the government can be exempt from blame. One might argue that this policy was so unreasonable that those adversely affected might blame the government on the grounds of culpable negligence. Yet this adds another layer of complexity: When assessing the extent of government negligence one must be careful to avoid the trap of hindsight bias (the concept of judging a decision based on information unbeknownst to the decision maker at the time).

With these concepts in mind we must assess both sides of the overarching argument: Was the Mati fire the government’s fault or the fault of factors beyond their control? Starting with the role of the government, one must naturally explore the use of suppression tactics in contributing to the events at Mati. Fire suppression is an approach based on managing a blaze once it has already begun. It involves costly deployment of both firefighters and equipment. Between 1998 and 2017 the budget for fire suppression rose significantly from 150 million Euros to 380 million Euros. Despite this substantial investment the average burned area per year actually rose from 44,805 ha between 1978-1997 to 45,017 in the years 1998-2017. Fire suppression was failing to deliver the results that its heavy costs had led many to expect. Fire prevention is the second strand of fire management techniques and focuses on reducing fire risk before they occur. This includes practices such as forest pruning and informing the wider public of evacuation plans. Both of these precautions were absent in Mati. Upon analysing the decision to adopt suppression over prevention tactics it is clear that this was an area of fundamental failure in the lead up to Mati, demonstrating key flaws in the government’s claims to innocence.

Moreover, government incompetence on the day of the fire was another crucial factor for Mati’s outcome. Marathonas Avenue is a long stretch of motorway that forms a barrier between Mati and the fire’s origin point.

As the flames encroached upon the town the road became impassable, prompting officials to redirect traffic. The results were catastrophic. Government officials unknowingly ushered drivers back into the path of the fire, sending them down narrow streets that led to the heart of Mati. Upon realising their mistakes the drivers were already trapped between the encircling flames and jagged cliffs. It was in the small streets of Mati that most people died, stranded in their vehicles as they awaited a certain fate.

On the other side of the argument are the external factors outside of government control. The first external factor that I explored was the influence of geography and weather on the Mati fire. Most significantly, the rapid change in wind speed and direction suggest the inexorable nature of the fire. At 16:30 Mati was experiencing a light southerly wind. At 16:57 it is believed that the fire had started in the Penteli mountain range, a few kilometres east of Mati. By 17:01 the conditions had altered drastically, with windspeeds now increasing to 77 mph and direction changing to a strong westerly wind. Hence, just as the fire began the wind had started fanning it towards Mati at speeds which were almost impossible to predict. Thus there are grounds to suggest that it was nature’s extremities and not human influence which caused the Mati fire.

There is also a case to suggest a wider societal responsibility for the causation of the Mati tragedy. This can be explained through a concept pertaining to ‘Unnatural Hazards’. This theory asserts that natural hazards are commonly occurring and unstoppable, but that disaster events are human induced. In the case of Mati there are many details that may point to this being true. For example, the area surrounding Mati saw numerous fires in the years prior to the 2018 blaze. In July 1995 fires burned across Penteli mountain, destroying 251 km2 of land. Two decades later in August 2009 further fires burned 850 km2 of land in Eastern Attica. Whilst neither of these fires brought many casualties, they demonstrated the imminent threat that Mati seemed to be facing. The 2018 fire burned just 14.9 km2 – a far smaller amount of land compared to previous infernos. This demonstrates the disaster’s sense of inevitability that many failed to recognise. Furthermore, the Mati residents could have done far more to protect themselves from the danger of wildfires – many did not prune their pine trees, allowing the fire to migrate rapidly through the town. This is due to a phenomenon known as place attachment, whereby residents felt so accustomed to Mati’s character and charm that they were reluctant to change its physical features. The voluntary decision to ignore an obvious threat for the sake of place attachment is a valid reason for attributing blame to society rather than the government.

The final external factor to introduce is that of Greece’s wider economic and migration trends throughout the 20th century. Between 1960-2000 there was unprecedented rural to urban migration occurring in Greece. Such movements are near impossible for a government to tightly control. The effects of this migration were twofold: Primarily, the movement of mainly farmers and agricultural workers to find employment in the tertiary sector left much of the countryside unprotected. As many farmers once pruned the land as part of their livelihood, the rural exodus left the countryside to grow freely. The result was a build up in fuel load and a far greater risk of large wildfires occurring. Moreover, many farmers moved into settlements on the fringes of urban areas. Such settlements became known as the peri-urban interface which is a category that Mati falls beneath. These areas are extremely dangerous given their high fire risk and dense populations. Thus the rapid rural to urban migration not only increased the risk of fires occurring, but also exacerbated the dangers that fires posed to humans.

In conclusion, it was indeed the government’s errors which proved to be most critical for the 2018 Mati wildfire tragedy. Whilst the external factors are numerous and important in isolation, the disorganised and futile attempts of fire suppression and prevention proved to be the most crucial aspects of the Mati fire’s causation and outcome. Whilst my final verdict resembles the popular opinion seen in the aftermath of the Mati fire, I still believe that a holistic analysis of blame was an important process. To ignore the multiple external factors that contributed to the fire is both simplistic and irresponsible. Whilst it is true that Greek fire management requires significant reform, there are also ways in which society could improve fire security. Although the macro objectives of government officials are often the defining factors of any major event, one should always recognise the power of the individual to impact any given situation. Through understanding the extreme nature of the Mati fire one can also appreciate that – to an extent – governments cannot be solely blamed for natural disasters. It is critical to ensure that we remain fair and judicious even when our instincts tell us otherwise, as without objectivity we will never find the most optimal solutions. ❚