Here is the full transcript of social scientist Dr Emmanuel Raju’s talk titled “Disasters: Are We The Problem?” at TEDxHyderabad 2022 conference.
Listen to the audio version here:
TRANSCRIPT:
The Impact of Disasters on Society
Disasters have caused havoc in our societies. This insurance is not covered by acts of God. Natural disasters strike again. History repeats itself. The deadliest natural disasters in human history. We’ve heard all of these phrases over and over again. This is not new. But what I am going to talk about today is unnatural disasters.
Let’s think about why do disasters occur in the society. Why do we see these impacts in society the way they are? Why am I calling them unnatural disasters? Floods, earthquakes, cyclones, hurricanes, name it, these are all natural hazards.
When these hazards meet us in society, that’s when they become disasters. Today we are also messing with natural hazards in the context of climate change, because we’ve altered the frequency and intensity of these hazards. What are disasters then? Disasters, simply put, are processes that erupt in society when hazards meet our society.
Hazardous Places and Vulnerable Communities
Take a look at this picture and let’s think about a landslide or a mudslide that might occur right there. Who put these buildings here? Why did we allow these constructions to happen? Let’s also ask ourselves, who probably lives here?
Is it a choice? It’s probably, and most likely, lack of resources, lack of access to resources, and lack of choices. It’s very often the poor, the marginalized, who live in hazardous places. It’s always important to ask ourselves, who lives in these hazardous places?
What I am talking about is not completely new. I’ll take you back to the Lisbon earthquake, the famous Lisbon earthquake of 1755. A conversation between two great thinkers, Voltaire and Rousseau, who said, “Nature did not construct these 20,000 houses of six and seven stories there.” This was in 1755.
And today, we continue to have the same conversation of natural disasters.
What is wrong about calling them natural disasters? It’s wrong because we attribute the disaster to nature. That means we place blame and responsibility for human action and inaction on nature.
Human Constructions and Climate Change
It’s an easy escape route to blame nature for human construction. That’s when we sit comfortably and think about, what can we do about this? The rain was unprecedented. There’s nothing that we can do about climate change.
Climate change also is a human creation. It’s human action and inaction today. And human constructions are both physical and social. This line is a very powerful line. “Earthquakes don’t kill people. Faulty buildings do.” People have said this for a long time. There are many places in the world where we see massive impacts after earthquakes.
And there are also places in the world where we see little impact. What does this have to do with building regulations, building codes, land governance? Those are what make these hazards into disasters. What’s more important is we often forget the social side of disasters.
Social Inclusion and Digital Literacy in Disasters
And that’s what we, people like me, have been trying to understand. Why are people impacted this way? We’re currently working on a very interesting project looking at the role of social media and crowdsourcing in disasters in a European Union context. And what we find is very interesting that most of the research and most of the conversations on this topic are around the technology and the hazard and less about the people affected by disasters, less about social inclusion, less about the digital literacy divide that exists in society.
How many people can read and write? How many people can understand in a language that we communicate? Are we providing the right source of disaster information? All of these questions become relevant in a context of technology.
It’s not only about solutions. It’s about making sure that these solutions reach people in the most efficient manner. Let’s talk about the pandemic, for example. I had the luxury of converting a room in my home to an office space and work from that home office for two years.
Most people in the world do not have that luxury, do not have that access. Think about all the frontline workers. This digital divide, for example, education really showed us during the pandemic. When a lot of education went online, think about all the children who didn’t have access to a smartphone or a laptop in their house.
Everyday Realities and Structural Problems
That’s the social side of disasters. Very recently, in 2019, after Cyclone Yaas, there were Dalit communities who were not allowed to enter a cyclone shelter. That’s not a manifestation of the disaster. That’s a manifestation of everyday life.
That’s a manifestation of how we are organized as a society. Disasters are societal problems, and disasters, what we see during disasters, those impacts are manifested because of everyday realities, because how we organize our society on a daily basis, making some communities, making the marginalized communities even more vulnerable during disasters. Take the heat wave, for example. Again, I had the luxury of working from home in a gated community, access to air con and fan.
Think about all the people, the frontline workers, think about people who had to stay in the heat, our vegetable vendors, our traffic police. We see them. But what we also don’t see is, for example, many livelihood activities that actually need to stay indoors, and the livelihood itself also generates a certain amount of heat. Their plight of working during the heat wave is unimaginable.
The problem today is, we recognize disasters as problems of the hazard. Unfortunately, that’s wrong, because disasters have less to do with the hazard and more to do with society and structural problems in society. The way we are organized in society. This is a picture from Bangladesh, in southern Bangladesh.
Livelihoods and Risks
I was here with my students in 2011, and we saw these communities that were massively affected by Cyclone Ilsa and Cyclone Sidr. These cyclones created havoc in these communities, many lives lost, primarily fishing communities. We were conducting an exercise of understanding risk and disasters, and we were ranking the different hazards that affect these societies. To our surprise and to everyone’s surprise, these communities did not talk about Cyclone Ilsa or Cyclone Sidr for a long time.
Guess what was on top of their list? This is the most beautiful ecosystem in the world, the Sundarbans, and they ranked tigers as their biggest hazard. Why? Because they venture into fish, and tigers, they’re worried that the tigers will eat away their men.
They put their life at risk every day for a livelihood. Our understanding of disasters is primarily only about hazards, but it’s about lives, livelihoods, social status, and all that comes with it in society. And today, there is a much wider discussion on this topic of wildlife and how it’s becoming a huge conversation within the disaster risk management community. India and Bangladesh are considered champions of disaster preparedness and evacuation.
We’ve come a long way from the super cyclone of 1999. When I was a kid in school, I remember raising funds for the super cyclone, where many lives were lost, thousands of lives. And today, India and Bangladesh can evacuate a million people in less than 48 hours to safety. It’s a huge success story of disaster preparedness and evacuation.
Rebuilding Lives and Livelihoods
But that’s not enough, because when these communities go back to their homes, their homes are destroyed and their livelihoods are shattered. On an annual basis, every day. So what happens is, when people go back to their home, and there is no home or there is no fishing boat, they put all of their year’s savings into rebuilding their homes and buying a new boat, with little access to relief and compensation. The big disasters get noticed in society.
The big disasters make the headlines, but these are annual problems that occur on a regular basis, over and over again. Yet they are not recognized as disasters. We are normalized in society, because we are not addressing the core problem of disasters, of why do these impacts occur, and who is impacted the most during disasters. That’s why it’s wrong to call natural disasters an attribute to blame somewhere else.
Where do we go from here? How do we rise together, just coming out of the pandemic? We will only rise together if we stop blaming nature for disasters, because the solutions lie in human action. And it’s time for major transformations.
The time for small change is over. Disasters are development problems, disasters are socio-political and economic problems. We need to talk about investing in measures that protect our society and people, so that we don’t see the same impacts in the future. The future for disaster risk management is about breaking those root causes of why do these impacts occur.
Marginalization and Disaster Risk
Gender, caste, religion, all of these factors that marginalize some groups of people put them more at risk. And until we untangle those drivers, until we address those root causes, we’re not going to solve this problem. And for that, we need to be working together to invest in processes that do not create disaster risk, because it is our developmental progress in many places that has also created disaster risk. Think about all the communities who get impacted by disasters on a regular basis, and let’s ask ourselves that question.
Why do these communities get impacted disproportionately? All of us are impacted by disasters, but there are many communities who are disproportionately impacted on a regular basis, over and over again. The solution to disaster risk management lies in understanding and examining these root causes, and in good governance measures that need to start from the very grassroots of society. What the pandemic has taught me is a lot of hope, a lot of solidarity, despite all the consequences.
And I believe that hope and solidarity will take us a long way in addressing some of the problems that we have in society with regard to disasters. Thank you.