Choosing or avoiding disaster

ABSTRACT

This article explores why the term ‘natural disaster’ is a misnomer. Based on long-standing research, it argues that disasters do not occur due to environmental hazards such as earthquakes and floods. Instead, disasters happen when human attitudes, values and behaviours force people into, or lead people to choose to be in, harm’s way, making them vulnerable. Choices creating and perpetuating vulnerabilities are the disaster and these choices are not from nature but are societal processes.

Keywords:

• disaster risk reduction
• mitigation
• prevention
• resilience
• vulnerability

Notes

Further reading around disaster terminology can be found in the GA’s journal Teaching Geography – see Puttick et al. (2018).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Ilan Kelman

Ilan Kelman is Professor of Disasters and Health at the Institute for Risk and Disaster Reduction/Institute for Global Health, University College London, UK, and University of Agder, Kristiansand, Norway