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| The Impact of Development on Violent Nature |
| Andrew E. Collins |
| Disaster and Development Centre (DDC), Department of Geography and Environment, Northumbria University, UK |
| *Corresponding author: |
Andrew E. Collins
Disaster and Development Centre
(DDC)
Department of Geography and Environment
Northumbria University, UK
Tel: 651-696-6126
Fax: 651-696-6116
E-mail: andrew.collins@northumbria.ac.uk |
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| Received July 27, 2012; Accepted July 28, 2012; Published July 29, 2012 |
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| Citation: Collins AE (2012) The Impact of Development on Violent Nature. J Geogr
Nat Disast 2:e107. doi:10.4172/2167-0587.1000e107 |
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| Copyright: © 2012 Collins AE. This is an open-access article distributed under
the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted
use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and
source are credited. |
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| Editorial |
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| It is well established that development impacts on disaster
outcomes and our coping with extreme and uncertain natural hazards.
Evidence includes through data available from the annual Human
Development Reports of the United Nations Development Programme
and the World Disasters Reports of the International Federation of Red
Cross and Red Crescent (IFRC). The data shows that whilst deaths are
generally highest in countries with low human development indices,
numbers affected are significantly higher in those with medium
development indices. Economic damage is highest in those with high
development indices. This also indicates how relationships between
disaster and development are prone to varying categorisations of
human progress and types of crises. |
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| Meanwhile, major ongoing threats are interconnected global
concerns. As such, articulation of ‘development disaster’ is from time to
time renewed via global forums expressing objectives of sustainability,
such as the Rio+20 United Nations Conference on Sustainable
Development in June, 2012. Uncertain trends in environmental,
economic and social systems and rapid onset crises indicate sustainable
development and disaster risk reduction to be a common agenda
of protecting people and planet. A question is therefore to what
extent can we consolidate the disaster and development nexus for
new development thinking and actions that truly address ongoing
challenges to quality of life and survival? |
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| Part of the learning in disaster and development studies over the
last four decades has been to realise how outcomes of major crises
are a function not of the violent natures of environmental hazards,
but of people being in the wrong place at the wrong time without
adequate forms of protection. Often referred to as a vulnerability
perspective of disaster, more recent emphasis has been put on human
or institutional resilience of individuals, societies, nations and so forth.
The key observation of both a vulnerability and a resilience perspective
has been that people, by definition the constituent composition of a
disaster, are central to altering future outcomes, whether through being
more susceptible to change, being more fragile or more resilient. What
makes people vulnerable, resilient, healthy, strong, happy, prosperous
or most other descriptors is however both a function of contexts and
choices, otherwise known as the structural and agentive aspects of
being. |
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| Whilst economically poor people may be so because wealthy
people made them so through uneven development, a further crucial
reality is that all people make choices that put themselves and others
at more or less risk of catastrophic human and environmental loss.
Understanding a balance between forced and chosen influences on
being at risk is a complex field, such that care is required in the analyses
of cultures and contexts both highly localised and more global. Despite
economic, social, behavioural and environmental differences, villagers
in the cyclone belt of the Bay of Bengal to radioactivity displaced
people in Japan or those impoverished by oil spills in Nigeria or losing
livelihoods in the Gulf of Mexico have in common a need for their
rights to disaster reduction to be upheld. In sum, the evidence from
case studies of people centred disaster and development interventions is that combinations of political will, behaviour change and knowledge
development through appropriate education and technology would
secure more sustainable futures. |
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| Beyond recognising the nature of the problem, a second
challenge is to identify the mechanisms for implementing the paths
to development stability required to attain more controllable disaster
risks. Here I suggest two approaches that ultimately also combine –
one in which resilience is enhanced to reduce hazard risks and one in
which we manage uncertainty. They are referred to separately by way of
emphasising that too much of one without the other would be to either
invest in the wrong action, or alternatively to improve knowledge
but without actions. The efficient and affective route is therefore to
reduce human vulnerability in the broad social and economic sense
whilst accepting a level of uncertainty about its effects. After all, social
and economic improvements reduce human loss and can protect the
environment, and knowledge can be detrimental as well as a benefit if
limited to inappropriate actions such as in the interests of subjugation,
uneven development and further environmental degradation. The
combined call for political will, behaviour change and appropriate
technology with education therefore points towards in-depth,
motivated engagement in disaster and development studies beyond
conventions of resilience and uncertainty that we have seen to date. |
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| The next part of the challenge is to identify obstacles to progressing
the political will, behaviour change and improved technology and
education suggested here. There are likely to be many, with varied
reactions to growing crises based on policy rationales developed under
varying conditions of disaster certainty and impact. Investment choices
both personally and institutionally need to address both short term and
long term environmental, economic and social impacts adequately to
address underlying vulnerability and development issues, whilst raising
moral and political awareness. This means action towards confronting
the more unacceptable and unjust risks and a more precautionary
approach generally, whether in contexts of climate change, uneven
development, economic instability environmental and social impacts.
It means using the best of our evidence base to reduce environmental
threats in the most inclusive ways possible, to negotiate longer-term
adaptations, wellbeing and poverty reduction. It is also to develop
accessible knowledge and understanding, opportunities for diplomacy,
rights and moralistic persuasion including through the most propeople
political orientations that can offer sustainable development. |
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