Understanding global security - Peter Hough

NATURAL THREATS TO SECURITY
option brings heightened vulnerability to natural hazards – the former from
earthquakes and the latter from landslides.
Environmental change
Natural disasters often occur for rational, natural reasons. Tropical cyclones can be
understood as ‘safety valves’which dissipate the build-up of excessive heat in the
ocean or atmosphere (Ingleton 1999). This has led some climatologists to suggest
that the increased prominence of the El Nino effect in the 1990s, associated with
more frequent cyclones and other extreme weather phenomena, could be linked to
global warming (Mazza 1998, Trenberth 1998).
Global economic forces
In the same way that new health and environmental threats can be linked to social
change prompted by global economic forces promoting modernization, so too can
natural hazards. Changes to the human–environmental equilibrium can prompt
natural hazards or make people more susceptible to ‘regular’ hazards. Lopez noted
how subsistence farming tribes had, in the 1980s, become more at risk from tropical
storms and landslides as a result of being pushed into higher ground by the
establishment of modern farmsteads (Lopez 1987). In addition, the traditional
relationship between people and natural phenomena may be broken by globalization.
Societal coping mechanisms can develop over time in areas prone to extreme
meteorological or geothermal events and these might be undermined by profound
socio-economic changes related to modernization and development. Well-meaning
outside interventions can sometimes even prove unhelpful. Traditional tactics for
dealing with flooding in Bangladesh, which include building portable houses, burying
precious possessions and responding to certain behaviour patterns in animals
associated with an imminent cyclone, have tended to be overlooked by outside
agencies. A report on NGO activity in Bangladesh found that, as a result, wellequipped
relief agencies were sometimes less prepared for a flood than the local
population, with serious consequences since they had assumed control of response
operations (Matin and Taher 2000).
Preparedness for coping with natural disasters might also be diminished by
outside pressures in a more overt way. It has been suggested that the capacities
of Nicaraguan and Honduran social services to deal with the effects of Hurricane
Mitch in 1998 were diminished by structural adjustment policies put in place in both
countries to meet the conditions of IMF loans (Comfort et al. 1999).
Vulnerability to natural disasters
In 1999 there were twice as many disaster events reported in the USA as in
Bangladesh, but Bangladesh suffered 34 times more deaths from those disasters
(UNEP 2000). This is not an isolated example. The Red Cross highlight a clear
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