Understanding global security - Peter Hough

NATURAL THREATS TO SECURITY
relief operations. The post-Cold War ‘peace dividend’ in Europe has seen armies
increasingly engaged in this non-military function as illustrated by the growing
prominence of NATO in this sphere of activity. The UK Liberal Democrats have
advocated the establishment of a UN Rapid Reaction Disaster Task Force. Natural
disasters are global problems in both a geological and human sense. State borders
are irrelevant in both regards. The natural dimensions can better be countered by
a pooling of human efforts and ingenuity and the socio-economic dimensions of
vulnerability can better be addressed by global action. Global problems require global
solutions and natural disasters are doubly global problems.
Key points
• Natural disasters are socio-political phenomena since it is human vulnerability
to natural hazards, rather than the hazards themselves, which chiefly accounts
for the security threat they pose.
• Windstorms represent the biggest contemporary ‘natural’ human security
threat, followed by floods and earthquakes.
• Human vulnerability to natural hazards has increased in recent years due
principally to population growth and movement in the global South.
• Global policy to mitigate the effects of natural disasters has traditionally been
dominated by technical fixes, such as increasing predictive capacity, but
recently has begun also to address the underlying socio-political issue of human
vulnerability to hazards.
Notes
1 EADRCC operations have been dominated by natural disasters, particularly floods.
2 The UK Minister for International Development, Clare Short, famously accused the
Montserrat administration of demanding ‘golden elephants’ when they appealed for
greater aid.
Recommended reading
Blaikie, M., Cannon, T., Davis, I. and Wisner, B. (1994) At Risk. Natural Hazards, People’s
Vulnerability, and Disasters, London & New York: Routledge.
Ingleton, J. (ed.) (1999) Natural Disaster Management. A Presentation to Commemorate the
International Decade for Natural Disaster Reduction (IDNDR), Leicester: Tudor Rose.
Kelman, I. and Koukis, T. (eds) (2000) ‘Disaster Diplomacy’, Cambridge Review of International
Affairs, special section XIV(1, Autumn–Winter): 214–294.
Smith, K. (2001) Environmental Hazards. Assessing Risk and Reducing Disaster, 3rd edn, London
& New York: Routledge.
UNEP (2002) GEO3 Chapter 3 Human Vulnerability to Environmental Change, http://geo.
unep-wcmc.org/geo3/.
Wisner, B. (2000) ‘Disasters. What the United Nations and its World Can Do’, United Nations
Chronicle (online edition) XXXVIII(4), http://www.un.org/Pubs/chronicle/2000/
issue4/0400p6.htm.
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