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.