Understanding global security - Peter Hough

NATURAL THREATS TO SECURITY
correlation between economic development and the deadliness of natural disasters.
Between 1991 and the end of 2000, an average 22.5 people were killed per reported
disaster in ‘highly developed states’, rising to 145 per disaster in ‘medium development
states’ and 1052 per disaster in low human development states (IFRC 2001:
Chapter 8). Clearly money can buy some degree of security from natural disasters.
More particularly it is the sort of well-evolved legal environment associated with
economic development that brings security to people. ‘It is not an “Act of God” that
no more than 10 per cent of the multi-storey structures in Indian cities are built
according to earthquake resistant norms’ (Wisner 2000).
Bankoff, however, cautions that shifting the focus for dealing with natural
disasters from technical responses to tackling underlying vulnerability carries a
danger of conflating securing those at risk with modernization and traditional notions
of economic development. Designating large proportions of the population of the
global South as ‘vulnerable’ reinforces the notion that such people can only be ‘saved’
by technical assistance from the North (Bankoff 2001). Some aspects of economic
globalization, as the previous section highlighted, have served to make LDC populations
more vulnerable at the same time as furthering their economic development.
In thinking about natural disasters, then, ‘vulnerable’ should not simply be conflated
with ‘undeveloped’ or ‘poor’, even though there is clearly some correlation. Various
factors, natural and social and local and global, combine to render certain individuals
vulnerable to natural hazards. From a ‘horizontal’ perspective, the strategy most
effective for securing vulnerable people from the risks presented by natural hazards
is reducing their vulnerability through societal learning and empowerment. The less
vulnerable of the world can assist in this with emergency assistance and technical
applications to tame the effects of natural hazards, but also by tackling their own
contribution to exacerbating the effects of such hazards.
Preparing for the unexpected – the global politics of
natural disaster management
The horizontal versus vertical approaches debate seen in combating global disease
resurfaces in the global politics of natural disasters. Proponents of a horizontal
approach have become more prominent in recent years, challenging traditional
assumptions that the best way to minimize human suffering from ‘Acts of God’ is
through the refinement and better application of technological solutions (a vertical
approach). The appliance of science, indisputably, is vitally important in developing
strategies to predict when disasters are likely to occur, lessen their human impact
when they do occur and assist in the process of recovery from damages that accrue.
‘Horizontalists’, however, contend that securing people from the effects of natural
disasters is as much a social as a technical task. Security for people threatened by
natural hazards cannot be achieved by tackling the physical causes of their risk
if social factors making them vulnerable are not addressed. ‘In many cases nature’s
contribution to “natural” disasters is simply to expose the effects of deeper, structural
causes’ (IFRC 2001: Introduction).
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