Environmental hazards and natural disasters

Commentary

Environmental hazards and natural disasters

Eric PawsonDepartment of Geography, University of Canterbury, Private Bag 4800,Christchurch, 8140, New Zealand

Abstract: How can the apparently growing frequency and cost of environmentalhazards be explained? Drawing on a range of examples, and especially the Canterburyearthquakes, it is argued that the creation of knowledge about these events dependson the interplay of lived and historical experience with scientific awareness. But oftenthe vulnerability of places to particular events is obscured by popular use of the terms‘natural hazard’ or ‘natural disaster’, as if human behaviour is absolved from anyresponsibility. It is shown how such thinking often increases the extent of the hazard,so that although we do not cause earthquakes, floods and bushfires, we are impli-cated and complicit in the outcomes.

Key words: bushfire, Canterbury earthquakes, disaster, environmental hazard, flood.

In the year following the first Canterburyearthquake of 4 September 2011, there werenearly 3,000 aftershocks of magnitude 3 orgreater, and well over 300 of or in excess ofmagnitude 4. The second Canterbury earth-quake, regarded by the geologists as an after-shock, but in the public mind a distinct event,happened on 22 February 2011. In manyrespects, it was far more damaging than thefirst, with a death toll of 180 and widespreaddestruction of buildings.1 In between times,Australia had endured what had come to seemalmost equally unusual: a summer of rains, withconsequential floods across Queensland, innerNew South Wales and Northern Victoria.Subsequently, something more terrible againoccurred: the Japanese mega-earthquake in theSendai region on 11 March, the accompanyingtsunami and ongoing nuclear emergency.

Making sense of hazards

How can we make sense of these events, andthe many that preceded them such as the Vic-

torian bushfires of 2009, the English floods of2007 or Hurricane Katrina in 2005? Are disas-ters getting more frequent? Why are seeminglyrising amounts of assets and numbers of livesbeing lost each year (Cutter 2001)? Is humanitybecoming more not less vulnerable to suchhazards, despite the historical geography ofmodernity? Has there not been an increasingseparation of culture from nature, reflecting thegrowing ascendancy of the first over thesecond? Did not modernity usher in a newregime of order and progress, superseding oldsuperstitions and fatalist submissions to ‘acts ofGod’ (Linehan 2009)?

How we think about nature and environmen-tal events is a useful place to begin. For 30 yearsor more, the literature of environmentalhazards has questioned whether the terms‘natural disaster’ and ‘natural hazard’ are par-ticularly useful, even though both are stillwidely used. Indeed, could they be conceptuallyunhelpful? This perspective is associated withthe Canadian geographer Ken Hewitt (1983),who has argued that we must always put

Note about author: Eric Pawson is Professor of Geography at the University of Canterbury. He countsenvironmental history and environmental management among his research interests.

E-mail: [email protected]

New Zealand Geographer (2011) 67, 143–147

© 2011 The AuthorNew Zealand Geographer © 2011 The New Zealand Geographical Society

doi: 10.1111/j.1745-7939.2011.01207.x

hazards in the wider social and political contextin which they occur, in order to understand howpeople are becoming more vulnerable. To thisway of thinking, there is no such thing as a‘natural hazard’. There are natural events thathave been happening for as long as historical orgeological time allows. And there are hazardsand disasters that occur when humans and theirconstructions are overwhelmed by occurrencesthat may or may not be predictable.

The Australian environmental historian TomGriffiths discussed this theme in an essaywritten in the wake of the Victorian bushfires.He opened it with a quote from Judge LeonardStretton, who chaired the Royal Commissioninto the 1939 Victorian bushfires. ‘They had notlived long enough’, wrote the judge. But thiswas not a lament on the death of the victims;rather, it was a comment on the environmental‘innocence of European migrants in a landwhose natural rhythms they did not yet under-stand’ (Griffiths 2009). The Victorian bush iscomprised of ash-type eucalypts that rely onfire to regenerate; this region of Australia hasbeen called the ‘fire flume’ because it is soprone to conflagration. The northern Mel-bourne suburbs and those of many small townshave long been extending into the fire zone. AsGriffiths says, it is not the ‘unprecedented’nature of the 2009 fires that is so haunting tothe historical sensibility, it is the ‘recurrentrealities’.

Producing environmentalknowledge

Can this argument be extended to the Canter-bury and Japanese earthquakes? Both coun-tries lie astride the ‘ring of fire’, the plateboundary zone that encircles the outer rim ofthe Pacific, around which tectonic movement isresponsible for thousands of earthquakes everyyear. Earthquakes are no stranger to the Japa-nese, whose traditional building techniques, ofsitting lightly on the land, recognised this. Norare they strangers to New Zealanders, even if inthe short European occupation of this land,there have only been a handful that haveseverely affected populated areas. Napier in1931 is the best recognised; the two that struckthe infant settlement of Wellington in 1848 and1855 are the most violent in Richter scale terms

(Grapes 2000). They had also not beenunknown in Christchurch (Cowan 1992), andthe collapsed cathedral tower and spire thatquickly became the international marker of the22 February event was evidence of this.The toppart of the spire fell twice during earthquakesin the late 19th century, and when this hap-pened again in 1901, its upper section wasrenewed not in stone but in timber sheathed incopper. The green-tipped spire was always areminder of seismic risk to the few who caredto look and know.

The response might be, of course, that thesewere events of such intensity that nothing couldhave been done to anticipate the consequences.The Japanese earthquake was magnitude 9 onthe Richter scale; the two Canterbury quakes,while much smaller in these terms, were sodamaging because they were shallow and in thefirst case, close to the city, and in the second,almost underneath it. The February 2011 eventwas marked by some of the most severe groundshaking ever recorded anywhere (Berrill 2011).New Zealand’s building code, introduced afterthe Napier earthquake, and progressively tight-ened since, could not allow for such forces. It isalso, like all such codes, designed to minimisedeath and injury, rather than to save structures.The Japanese awareness of seismic risk had ledto the construction of tsunami walls and shel-ters on higher ground. However, the walls wereoverwhelmed on 11 March and many peoplecould not reach the shelters in time.

At this juncture, it is useful to return to JudgeStretton, whose point was that lived experiencealone was never going to be enough to antici-pate the potential extent of natural events.‘They also needed history . . . And not just ofthe recent human past, but of the ancienthuman past, and also of the deep biological pastof the communities of trees’ (Griffiths 2009). Abetter understanding the deep biological pastwould have been especially useful in theChristchurch case, as much of the earthquakedamage was caused by liquefaction of silt andsandy soils lacking cohesion. These are wide-spread throughout the city, but especially in thecentre, eastern suburbs and parts of the south,reflecting its location on the edge of the pro-grading fan of the Waimakariri River. Duringthe earthquakes, fine silt was forced to thesurface under immense pressure through the

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violent shaking of subsurface soils. Thisdamaged the foundations of tall buildings, splitthe concrete pads on which new houses hadbeen built and disrupted (although often notterminally) the piles supporting older, woodenhomes. Lateral spreading of ground near waterbodies was also widespread. These risks werenot unknown, and an earlier engineering life-lines study (Lifelines Study 1997) had encour-aged, in particular, upgrading of the powernetwork. However, they had not been suffi-ciently appreciated to prevent subdivision forhousing on many weak soils in the precedingdecade.

Understanding the deep geological pastwould also have provided vital knowledge. It isthe combination of science and human experi-ence that helps us to know hazardous places.Earthquake risk in Canterbury had beenassumed by the public to be associated with theAlpine fault, way to the west of the city, on theother side of the mountains. Geologists werewell aware that the zone of active deformationassociated with the convergence of the Austra-lian and Pacific plates is characterised by acomplex systems of faults that extends throughand east of the mountains into North Canter-bury (Cowan 1992). However, the fault linesrevealed by the two earthquakes had not beendetected: seismic mapping had not been com-pleted as no one seems to have regarded it as ofhigh-enough priority. With the benefit of hind-sight, the tectonic risks might therefore havebeen more apparent. That they were not isperhaps understandable in a country of suchshort European habitation as New Zealand.The same does not apply to Japan, which has adeep human knowledge of these events. Wasthe Sendai region then simply unfortunate tobe close to the epicentre of an earthquake ofsuch magnitude?

Increasing environmental losses

Some insights that might be useful in thinkingabout these matters can be gleaned from workon another type of environmental hazards –floods. In insurance terms, it is floods that havebecome the most frequently occurring expen-sive disasters, whether as the result of: riverbehaviour, as in Queensland in 2011 or the westof England in 2007; tropical cyclones, as in New

Orleans in 2005; or tsunami, such as the IndianOcean event on Boxing Day 2004. From a busi-ness or individual point of view, insurance pro-vides the appearance of security against theunexpected. So too do engineering structures.Much of the world’s population feels suffi-ciently secure to live on coastlines and on floodplains yet paradoxically in defiance of mount-ing collective losses.

In the 1980s, Neil Ericksen demonstratedthat, up to that point, the more that had beenspent on river flood defences in New Zealand,the greater the extent of losses from floods overtime. As defence costs rose, losses escalated, ina country where almost every town or city isflood prone (Ericksen 1986). The reason is thatlocal governments, developers and consumersoften assume that it is safe to occupy land onceit is apparently protected by a flood defencescheme. The same applies elsewhere. Brisbane,for example, had doubled in size to about twomillion people between the 1974 floods andthose of 2011.Where had many of those peoplebeen housed in the meantime? On flood plains.Interestingly, the official report on the 1974event focused on the completion of dams forflood control purposes (Director of Meteorol-ogy 1974). In the USA, the phenomenon isknown as the levee effect: flood defences arepublicly perceived to make flood plains safe fordevelopment, thereby increasing the demandfor, and value of, property on the plain, andplacing more at risk. The destructive conse-quences were exposed in New Orleans in thewake of Hurricane Katrina (Bourne 2007).

Why do governments and people allow sucheventualities to occur? Smith and Petley (2009)identify three reasons. First, flood protectionschemes can be justified on cost-benefitgrounds, as the more intensive existing devel-opment, the greater the gains perceived toaccrue from new or enhanced control struc-tures. Second, such structures will likelyincrease land values in areas then protected,further enhancing the cost–benefit ratio. Third,the real costs are not usually internalised tothose gaining the benefits of such location.Private development is often protected bypublic investment in flood control. In the UK,pressure to develop housing has led to largeincreases in applications to develop flood proneland: many of these developments have gone

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ahead despite opposition from the country’sEnvironment Agency (Smith & Petley 2009).However, the inquiry into the Gloucestershirefloods in the northern summer of 2007 notedthat the Agency did not even have the authorityto comment in many cases (Scrutiny Inquiry2007).

It is the combination of this apparent insula-tion from natural events, combined with ashallow human memory of such occurrences,which leads to ever growing losses in terms ofassets and lives. This condition has beendescribed as one of ‘epistemic distance’, a termcoined to describe how difficult it is for people,planners and politicians to comprehend thenature of complex hazards that cannot be seenand occur in any one place relatively infre-quently (Carolan 2004). These themes arereflected in the final example of the nuclearemergency at the Fukushima-Daiichi plantnorth of Tokyo that occurred in the wake of theearthquake and tsunami of 11 March 2011. Wasthis a ‘natural disaster’? Like the other eventsdiscussed here, it was the product of comp-lex interactions between natural and humanfactors. It would not have occurred at that timeor in that form without the earthquake ortsunami. Yet, the event raises questions aboutthe wisdom of human decisions to constructnuclear reactors in hazardous seismic zonesand to maintain old nuclear technology thatlacks some of the features, such as roboticcontrol, that are incorporated to manage emer-gencies in more modern plants.

What then is to be done to ensure thatpeople can live less dangerously in the face ofenvironmental hazards? A start can be made byreferring to them as such, rather than as‘natural disasters’, a term that does nothing toadmit to the role of human awareness or culpa-bility. Second, recognition that long-termhazard is the product of poorly regulated, oftenspeculative, land development with its short-term time horizons. Less risky decisions mightresult from clearly allocating the costs ofhazard mitigation to those who benefit fromthis. An example would be to require develop-ers to treat soils where liquefaction is poten-tially an issue. Another is the differentiation ofproperty taxes according to the riskiness of par-ticular places. To an extent, this occurs throughanother mechanism when insurance companies

refuse cover, although often this is in responseto a hazardous event and merely further disad-vantages those whose assets and livelihoodshave already been undermined by locking theminto a uncertain location. Yet such mechanismswould at least encourage environmental aware-ness and human memory.

Do we learn?

But do we ever learn from history? This wasthe question Tom Griffiths asked in his analysisof the Victorian bushfires. He makes two strik-ing points: one of time, one of place. Given that‘nature can overwhelm culture’, it is in thedeep histories of the past that ‘lie the intrac-table patterns of our future’. And in workingwith that intractability, we need to understandthe particularities of places: we cannot treatthem as if they are all the same (Griffiths2009). On these grounds, in urban areas knownto be on the margins of seismically active areas,public good resources must be devoted to thenecessary surveys and building codes upgradedaccordingly. And when policies to meet peakoil are under consideration, the rush to nuclearpower of recent years in much of the northernhemisphere needs to be openly tempered bywhat has been learned from past nuclear acci-dents. When new housing developments areplanned, if sites not on flood plains are notavailable, then the costs of protecting thosehouses to known levels of risk must be openlyapportioned.

The alternative is obvious. Take flood plainhousing as the analogy. It covers previouslyporous surfaces in tarmac and concrete. Itincreases rapid run-off and diminishes theability of hydrological systems to cope withinlimits that suit human welfare. Not only do wethen falsely insulate ourselves from extremeevents with ‘control’ schemes but also ourbehaviour actually increases the extent of thehazard. In this sense, there are no natural disas-ters, only environmental hazards. We may notcause earthquakes, floods and bushfires, but weare both implicated and complicit in the devas-tating results.

Acknowledgements

I am grateful to a number of friends and col-leagues for their assistance with this Commen-

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tary, especially Ian Owens, Edwina Palmer,Geoffrey Rice and Vaughan Wood. An earlierversion was written for the May 2011 issue ofthe Newsletter of the Economic History ofAustralia and New Zealand.

Endnote

1 There are a number of web sites that providedetailed earthquake data for these events,including http://www.canterburyquakelive.co.nzand http://www.geonet.org.nz/index.html. The firstearthquake was of magnitude 7.1 and the second of6.3. Many Cantabrians regard the event of 13June 2011, also a 6.3, as the third earthquake (asopposed to an aftershock).

References

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Bourne JK (2007). New Orleans. National Geo-graphic 212 (2), 32–67.

Carolan MS (2004). Ontological politics: mapping acomplex environmental problem. Environmen-tal Values 13 (4), 497–522.

Cowan HA (1992). Structure, seismicity and tectonicsof the Porter’s Pass-Amberley fault zone, NorthCanterbury, New Zealand. Unpublished PhDthesis, University of Canterbury, Christchurch.

Cutter SL (2001). American Hazardscapes. TheRegionalization of Hazards and Disasters. TheNational Academy of Sciences, Washington, DC.

Director of Meteorology (1974). Brisbane FloodsJanuary 1974. Department of Science, Bureau ofMeteorology, Canberra.

Ericksen N (1986). Creating Flood Disasters? NewZealand’s Need for a New Approach to UrbanFlood Hazard, National Water and Soil Conser-vation Authority, Wellington.

Grapes RH (2000). Magnitude Eight Plus. NewZealand’s Biggest Earthquake. Victoria Univer-sity Press, Wellington.

Griffiths T (2009). We Still Have Not Lived LongEnough. [Cited 23 Sep 2011.] Availablefrom URL: http://inside.org.au/we-have-still-not-lived-long-enough

Hewitt K (1983). Interpretations of Calamity from theViewpoint of Human Ecology. Allen and Unwin,Boston, MA.

Lifelines Study (1997). Risks and Realities. A Multi-disciplinary Approach to the Vulnerabilityof Lifelines to Natural Hazards, Centre forAdvanced Engineering, University of Canter-bury, Christchurch.

Linehan T (2009). Modernity. In: Kitchin R, Thrift N,eds. International Encyclopedia of Human Geog-raphy. Elsevier, Amsterdam, pp. 157–63.

Scrutiny Inquiry (2007). Scrutiny Inquiry into theSummer Emergency 2007. Final Report, Glouc-estershire County Council, Gloucester.

Smith K, Petley DN (2009). Environmental Hazardsand Reducing Disasters. Routledge, New York.

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