Houston Harvey flooding

Disaster by choice: The need to create a culture of warning and safety

The tornado, the earthquake, the virus are not to blame for our decisions.

Disasters are not natural. We—humanity and society—create them and we can choose to prevent them.


Stating that natural disasters do not exist because humans cause disasters seems insanely provocative. We witness nature ravaging our lives all the time: from a city underwater after a storm roars off the Atlantic to rows of smouldering houses after a wildfire to the dust rising from the ruins after an earthquake.

How could we withstand the 250 mile per hour winds of a tornado, faster than Japan's bullet trains, or the 2,200ºF temperature of lava, hotter than many potters' kilns? How would we feel if an "expert" lectured to us that it was not nature's fault, as we sifted through the few photos salvaged from the pile of debris that was once our home and our life?

Yet even when we cannot keep our infrastructure standing, we can stop people dying, we can protect our most valuable possessions, and we can learn to deal with devastation. The disaster lies not in the forces unleashed by nature, but in the deaths and injuries, the loss of irreplaceable homes and livelihoods, and the failure to support affected people, so that a short-term interruption becomes a long-term recovery nightmare.

COVID-19 New York City

The New York National Guard loads cars with meals to distribute to those in quarantine due to COVID-19. (Credit: The National Guard)

Even the COVID-19 pandemic is not a natural disaster. We know that new viruses emerge and infect us all the time. We could have improved our monitoring for and response to emerging diseases, which means—at minimum—not silencing and intimidating health professionals who report that something might be happening. And, long before, we must build robust health systems and health coverage, so that countries can be confident of taking care of a sick population. Then follow the long-ago-shelved pandemic plans that would have told the world how to deal with the new coronavirus without it becoming a pandemic forcing so many of us into lockdown for weeks.

The tornado, the earthquake, the virus are not to blame for our decisions.

They are manifestations of nature that have occurred countless times over the aeons of Earth's history. The disaster consists of our inability to deal with them as part of nature. We have the knowledge, ability, technology, and resources to build houses which are not ripped apart by 250 mile per hour winds. If we choose to, we can create a culture with warning and safe sheltering.

Lava at 2,200ºF and a tsunami higher than our building are harder to ride out. But we can shun places likely to be hit by them or we can create a culture that understands and accepts periodic destruction, again with warning and safe evacuation, to permit swift rebuilding afterwards. The baseline is that we have options regarding where we live, how we build, and how we get ourselves ready for living with nature.

Many of the choices we make currently permit death and devastation. They create the conditions for disasters, not nature.

Inequities, underdevelopment, and marginalization

January 12, 2020, marked the tenth anniversary of Haiti's earthquake disaster, killing at least 150,000 people and possibly up to double this number, the vast majority of them poor Haitians living in inadequate constructed dwellings. Yet knowledge of Haitian earthquakes extends back centuries, with many previous earthquakes around the country experienced and recorded.

Despite this knowledge of seismicity, little action was taken.

Why was the infrastructure in and around the capital city so poorly constructed? Why were so many people poor, leaving them with no choice but to live in these buildings without hope of improving them? Why did even many affluent parties, from the country's president to the United Nations to the developers of luxury hotels, not enact basic earthquake safety principles?

These questions were being asked in 2010: a meeting on tackling disasters in Haiti, highlighting seismic safety, was concluding on January 12, 2010, when the earthquake rumbled through.

The overwhelming inequities, underdevelopment, and marginalization precluded a quick fix. Haiti, as a country, is not especially poor or under-resourced, but the scale of inequality is horrifying. Centuries in the making, all these problems could not be easily tackled or solved.

It takes time to put up tens of thousands of buildings that lasted barely a minute on January 12, 2010. It takes time to create a city rife with informal settlements, without basic services, and lacking planning regulations, building codes, and institutions to monitor and enforce such laws.

It takes time to produce a culture of day-to-day bustle across exposed electric wires, through haphazard doorways, and around informal structures. The earthquake lasts seconds, but creating a society accepting infrastructure that cannot withstand earthquakes—creating the vulnerability, which creates the disaster—takes decades and centuries.

Haiti Earthquake 2010

A family awaits treatment at a Red Cross First Aid Post in Port-au-Prince, Haiti after the 2010 earthquake. (Credit: American Red Cross)

Human-created vulnerability

Same with the recent bushfires in Australia. The country has good reason to fear such flames. The incongruously named Ash Wednesday fires of February 16, 1983, killed 75 people across two states in 12 hours. Tasmania lost 62 people to the Black Tuesday fires of February 7, 1967.

The most lethal Australian bushfire disaster occurred exactly 42 years later on February 7, 2009, or Black Saturday: 173 people died and 414 were injured.

Indigenous Australians managed fires for tens of thousands of years. They set controlled blazes to alter the environment for maintaining tracks, trapping animals, and avoiding the build-up of burnable fuel that could lead to large conflagrations.

Over time, Indigenous practices adapted the ecosystems to support plant species that could survive low-intensity bushfires, actually using fire to propagate. Fire was part of land use and land management, integrated into human needs among other environmental adjustments, although we do not really know how many fire disasters the Indigenous Australians might have caused nor how many of them perished in the flames.

Europeans imported and imposed a different perspective of bushfires. Flames were presumed always to be dangerous and damaging, so they were suppressed and fought. As settlements expanded into the bush, fires indeed became highly destructive and lethal, reinforcing the combat mode.

The 2020 fires continue this pattern. Despite the heat wave and the fires' intensity and extent, plenty could have been done over the long-term to avoid the witnessed catastrophe. Over past decades, cities and towns have expanded significantly into burnable areas.

Home owners can design and maintain their houses and land to reduce the chance of them catching alight during a bushfire. No guarantees ever exist of saving property, but we have seen the difference in Australia this year between those whose dwellings survived and those who sadly lost everything or who tragically perished while staying behind to defend.

The key is preparing years in advance, including being ready to lose one's home, knowing that fires are part of the ecosystem and could happen any year, even if now being much more intense and expanding in range due to human-caused climate change. The fundamental cause of the Australian bushfire disasters was creating vulnerability to the environment, no matter what the fire hazard does.

Australian wildfires

A firefighter from the U.S. Bureau of Land Management assists with Australian bushfires in January. (Credit: BLMIdaho)

A path forward 

For the environmental events and processes we can deal with by reducing vulnerability, which are most of them, we are the real causes of disasters, not nature. Inadvertently or deliberately, in knowledge or in ignorance, disasters emerge through human choices, actions, behavior, and values. Closing this chasm between what we know and actually using this knowledge is not easy.

Some people aim to change fundamentals, focusing on the big picture in order to overcome baseline causes of vulnerabilities. Discrimination, poverty, inequity, and incompetence feed into disasters.

Others prefer to work on smaller scales and less ambitious steps. They demonstrate more direct, more tangible, and more immediate positive impacts, which they hope, in the end, might scale up to wider, deeper changes. Examples are managing forests to permit small wildfires and retrofitting properties to withstand earthquakes, all while changing our behaviour so that we can withstand wildfires and earthquakes without harm.

One approach never precludes the other. We can practice both together, so that they complement rather than impede each other. After all, chronic human conditions of vulnerability that cause disasters are ever-present, and must be tackled, at all scales, especially over the long term. This means that disasters never manifest rapidly. Rather than an event, we should recognize that a disaster is a long-term process.

Some hazards release their forces and energies swiftly with little specific warning. While we know broadly where earthquakes could strike at any time, such as Haiti and Jamaica, we cannot yet predict that an earthquake will occur in a specific place at a specific time. We know broadly where hurricanes could strike, also including Haiti and Jamaica, and we can observe the progress of a specific hurricane, but we cannot predict beyond a few days in advance when and where a major storm might make landfall. We know that Haiti and Jamaica are vulnerable to earthquakes, hurricanes, tsunamis, epidemics, and many other hazards because of their long-term social inequities and infrastructure inadequacies.

Consequently, in the same way that disasters are not natural, they are not unusual or extreme. They dramatically expose the vulnerabilities with which people live, and are typically forced by others to live, on a daily basis.

We can prevent 'natural disasters' and their human suffering, despite the presence of major environmental hazards, by reducing vulnerabilities. We must actively choose to do so.

Ilan Kelman is Professor of Disasters and Health at University College London, England and a Professor II at the University of Agder, Kristiansand, Norway.

This is an adapted excerpt from Disaster by Choice by Ilan Kelman, published by Oxford University Press on May 1, available in hardback and eBook formats.

Banner photo: Texas National Guard soldiers arrive in Houston, Texas, to aid citizens in heavily flooded areas from the storms of Hurricane Harvey. (Credit: The National Guard)

A hurricane off the coasts of Florida and Cuba.

Forecasts warn of intensifying hurricane season as NOAA faces deep budget cuts

Scientists are bracing for a dangerous 2025 Atlantic hurricane season, even as the Trump administration pushes steep cuts to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), the federal agency responsible for storm forecasting.

Matt Simon reports for Grist.

Keep reading...Show less
Sunrise in the woods

Get our Good News newsletter

Get the best positive, solutions-oriented stories we've seen on the intersection of our health and environment, FREE every Tuesday in your inbox. Subscribe here today. Keep the change tomorrow.

The view from a barge moving down the Mississippi River toward a bridge under a partly cloudy sky.

Trump’s deregulation and FEMA cuts put Mississippi River and others at extreme risk, report warns

The Mississippi River tops this year’s list of America’s most endangered waterways, as environmental groups warn that President Trump’s sweeping deregulation and Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) budget cuts are accelerating threats to rivers across the country.

Nina Lakhani reports for The Guardian.

Keep reading...Show less
A bunch of baskets filled with white rice.

Climate change could make rice more toxic by boosting arsenic levels

Rice, a staple food for half the world’s population, may become increasingly toxic due to climate change, as new research finds that warming temperatures and rising carbon dioxide levels increase arsenic concentrations in the crop.

Georgina Gustin reports for Inside Climate News.

Keep reading...Show less
The scales of justice on a table in a courtroom.

Oil companies seek legal immunity modeled on gun industry’s shield from lawsuits

A growing push by fossil fuel companies to gain liability protection echoes the gun industry's successful effort two decades ago to shield itself from lawsuits that seek accountability for public harm.

Emily Sanders reports for ExxonKnews.

Keep reading...Show less
Power plant with smoke emitting from smokestacks at sunrise

EPA plans to ease coal ash rules as industry pushes to cut costs

Coal-fired power plants may soon face weaker waste regulations, as the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency moves to roll back Biden-era rules aimed at preventing toxic groundwater contamination from coal ash.

Michael Phillis reports for The Associated Press.

Keep reading...Show less
Smoke billowing out of towers at a power plant

Mercury emissions crackdown delayed for dozens of coal plants

The Trump administration has granted over 60 fossil fuel power plants a two-year delay in complying with stricter federal mercury emissions rules, reversing a key piece of environmental policy set to take effect in 2027.

Dan Gearino reports for Inside Climate News.

Keep reading...Show less
Offshore wind turbines rising out of the fog.

Trump administration halts offshore wind project already under construction in New York

The Biden-approved Empire Wind project off New York’s coast has been abruptly paused by the Trump administration, putting thousands of jobs and clean energy goals in jeopardy.

Jake Spring reports for The Washington Post.

Keep reading...Show less
From our Newsroom
Pennsylvania governor Josh Shapiro speaks with the state flag and American flag behind him.

Two years into his term, has Gov. Shapiro kept his promises to regulate Pennsylvania’s fracking industry?

A new report assesses the administration’s progress and makes new recommendations

silhouette of people holding hands by a lake at sunset

An open letter from EPA staff to the American public

“We cannot stand by and allow this to happen. We need to hold this administration accountable.”

wildfire retardants being sprayed by plane

New evidence links heavy metal pollution with wildfire retardants

“The chemical black box” that blankets wildfire-impacted areas is increasingly under scrutiny.

People  sitting in an outdoors table working on a big sign.

Op-ed: Why funding for the environmental justice movement must be anti-racist

We must prioritize minority-serving institutions, BIPOC-led organizations and researchers to lead environmental justice efforts.

joe biden

Biden finalizes long-awaited hydrogen tax credits ahead of Trump presidency

Responses to the new rules have been mixed, and environmental advocates worry that Trump could undermine them.

Op-ed: Toxic prisons teach us that environmental justice needs abolition

Op-ed: Toxic prisons teach us that environmental justice needs abolition

Prisons, jails and detention centers are placed in locations where environmental hazards such as toxic landfills, floods and extreme heat are the norm.

Stay informed: sign up for The Daily Climate newsletter
Top news on climate impacts, solutions, politics, drivers. Delivered to your inbox week days.