Environmental Risk And Hazards Research Paper

The overall cost of natural hazards, expressed either in monetary terms or through property loss or damage, is extremely high, estimated at more than $40 billion per year worldwide. Most of this is accounted for by floods (40 percent), tropical cyclones (20 percent), and drought (15 percent). Roughly two-thirds of the total cost stems from loss of life and property, and the rest is spent on attempts to reduce risk. On average, more than 250,000 people die from hazards in a typical year, most of them in developing countries in Latin American, Africa, and Asia.

1. Definitions

Everyday use generally defines risk as the chance of loss or injury, and hazard as a source of danger. The research literature uses the terms in more complex and sometimes contradictory ways, although precise interpretations are provided in some regulatory frameworks.

Environmental hazards are defined as extreme events or substances in the Earth and its ecological system that may cause adverse effects to humans and things they value (NRC 1996). The idea of hazard includes both the event and its consequences. Environmental hazards include geophysical and meteorological phenomena such as earthquakes, droughts, and hurricanes, often called ‘natural’ hazards, as well as pollution problems and other ‘technological’ hazards. Most scholars argue that an event does not become a hazard until humans are exposed to it, and thus that hazards result from the interaction of humans and extreme events.

Environmental risks are often defined as the product of a hazard and the likelihood of its occurring, using a simple formula that defines a risk as the product of the probability of an event and its severity measured in terms of the population exposed, and the nature of the consequences. For example, the risks of a nuclear accident have been expressed in terms of the chance (e.g., one in one million) per exposure unit (e.g., a person exposed to a certain level of radiation) getting cancer (consequences).

2. Research Traditions

Although people have long been concerned with the documentation of disasters and other environmental dangers, formal social science approaches to natural hazards are often associated with a group of scholars based at the University of Chicago and led by geographer Gilbert White. White set out to understand the processes by which humans become exposed to natural hazards, such as floods, and the role that human adjustments may make in reducing hazard losses. Prior research had focused on engineering approaches to reducing hazard losses, such as constructing levees and dams, but White’s work showed how such structures may actually increase losses by encouraging humans to occupy flood plains, and channeling water to create greater damage downstream (White 1958). A framework from ‘human ecology’ was employed to examine interactions between humans and extreme events in terms of human behavior and perceptions. White’s students were able to demonstrate how views and adjustments to hazards such as drought (Saarinen 1966) and flood (Kates 1962) were influenced by the socioeconomic and personality characteristics of individuals, and by their knowledge and experience of previous events. The major categories of adjustment included modifying the environment (e.g., cloud seeding during drought), modifying human behavior (planting different seeds), or redistributing losses (crop insurance). The concept of adjustment and response was important because these human actions could reduce the physical and social impact of an extreme event.

This framework drew on behavioral theories of decisions based on bounded rationality, where individuals made decisions based on limited knowledge within the constraints of a social system. The research results influenced education and warning programs and legislation, such as hazard zoning, that attempted to reduce occupancy of hazardous locations, and improve understanding and response to hazard warnings. For example, the US National Flood Insurance Program attempts to regulate land use in flood plains as a way of reducing social and economic damage from flooding. After White moved to the University of Colorado he started the Natural Hazards Research and Applications Information Center which coordinated several national and international assessments of various hazards, and met regularly with stakeholders to discuss research results (White 1974).

Although geography provided the main disciplinary home for hazards research, sociology and anthropology were also very active. Sociologists, led by Enrique Quarentelli, developed a different approach to understanding natural hazards that used theories of collective behavior and social organization to understand response to disasters (Quarantelli 1978). Anthropology contributed ideas about culture and development, including research that showed the significance of indigenous knowledge and cultural traditions in attitudes and responses to hazards and risks in several regions of the world (Douglas and Wildavsky 1982).

In response to devastating droughts in Africa and earthquakes in Latin America as well as the influence of Marxist thinking in the social sciences in the 1970s, hazard losses began to be blamed less on individual decisions and more on larger scale political and economic structures (O’Keefe et al. 1977, Hewitt 1984). This critical, structural, or political economy perspective focused on processes that forced people to live in hazardous environments, limited their access to information and resources, and impoverished people to levels where they could not adjust or recover from extreme events. For example, studies of earthquake impact and recovery in Nicaragua and Guatemala showed that working class and poor households were living in fragile housing, often on steep slopes, as a result of poverty and unequal land tenure systems, and were unable to gain access to disaster relief that was directed to the more powerful members of society (Cuny 1983).

An enduring concept to emerge from this work was that of ‘vulnerability,’ defined simply as the potential for loss in different places or among different social groups. Broader definitions encompass the characteristics of a person or group in terms of their capacity to anticipate, cope with, resist, and recover from the impacts of natural hazard (Blaikie et al. 1994). Vulnerability is conditioned by both biophysical and social conditions, including topography, poverty, access to information and insurance, gender, and ethnicity, and involves both external structural factors and individual capacity to cope with extreme events. It can be seen as the opposite of security, and as influenced by underlying dynamics of power relationships in society and access to resource entitlements (Watts and Bohle 1993).

Vulnerability studies often involved the detailed analysis and mapping of the distribution of sensitivity and resilience to hazards across geographic space, and between social sectors. Thus, they provided a deeper understanding of the distributive effects of hazards and responses to them. Women, children, and the elderly were found to be more vulnerable than the general population to many hazards.

For example, vulnerability to drought in Africa was associated with differential access to resources or entitlements to land, food, or assistance at a variety of scales ranging from the household to the global food system refracted through markets, environmental stresses, and multilateral trade and aid agreements. Influenced by Sen’s analysis of famine and entitlements (Sen 1981) vulnerability emerges from the interaction between drought and individuals’ abilities to produce food themselves, participate in the reciprocal or market exchange of labor and food, or gain effective access to relief and development assistance. The more frequently vulnerable groups include rural smallholders on marginal land, pastoralists, rural wage laborers, the urban poor, refugees, and displaced people, as well as women, children, the infirm, and the elderly (Downing 1996). Insights from such analyses have been used to develop vulnerability maps and famine early warning systems to assist in mitigation and relief efforts.

Other important concepts include that of ‘hazardousness of place,’ whereby the totality of hazards in a particular geographic location is analyzed (Hewitt and Burton 1971), and of hazards as part of everyday life in contrast to isolating them as departures from normal or accidents (Hewitt 1984). Both concepts point to the importance of viewing hazards within the larger context of social, political, and economic structures at scales ranging from the household to the community to the state. A growing interest in the hazards of the world’s major urban areas has shown how the combination of population growth and migration, poor infrastructure, economic growth, inadequate institutions, and poverty is creating vulnerability to disasters (Mitchell 1999). Half the world’s largest cities are located on earthquake belts or tropical cyclone tracks. The 1995 earthquake in Kobe, Japan, caused more than 6,000 fatalities and over $120 billion in economic loss. The Izmit, Turkey, earthquake in 1999 caused 20,000 fatalities and an estimated $20 billion in economic loss.

3. Technological Hazards And Environmental Risk Assessment

With the growth of the environmental movement and awareness about pollution problems, some researchers developed an interest in technological hazards, stimulated partly by the need for studies that would support the decisions of US regulatory agencies such as the Environmental Protection Agency or the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, and by a series of accidents and serious pollution incidents. Regulation of carcinogenic pollutants required careful assessments of the risks of environmental chemicals for human health. A 1974 study of nuclear reactor safety provided one of the first major examples of probabilistic environmental risk assessment, and prompted a vigorous debate about the appropriate methods for measuring and regulating pollution and accident risks (USAEC 1974).

Initial research on environmental risks focused on techniques for quantitative risk assessment that attempted to estimate the expected incidence of illness or death in human populations exposed to chemicals and other substances. The two major approaches were statistical or actuarial analyses based on past experiences, and laboratory experiments using animals or cell cultures. For example, risk assessment was used to estimate the expected rate of illness or death in a human population exposed to a hazardous chemical based on the number of experimental animals affected by various doses of the chemical as measured in laboratory experiments. Limitations of these environmental risk assessments included inadequate data or controls on past empirical occurrences, problems in extrapolating from high short-term experimental doses to longer-term exposure, and from animals to humans, and the likelihood of real-world multiple and interacting stresses. Risk estimates were often used to compare risks in order to allocate resources for risk management using techniques that compared a particular risk (such as coal-fired electricity generation) to risks of alternative technologies (e.g., hydroelectricity), everyday life (e.g., driving), or to the economic costs and benefits of the technology (e.g., health costs and low-cost electricity). Quantitative risk analysis has at its core the belief that decisions about technology can be made according to a monetary calculus in which costs, determined by quantifying loss of life and productivity, are balanced against total ‘social benefits.’ Risk–benefit analysis became controversial because it involved calculations that included placing often inconsistent values on human lives, injuries, or ecosystem damage. Scientific rankings of risk also differed with the views of the public, as shown in the keynote article by Starr (1969) that showed the public to be 1000 times more willing, on average, to accept voluntary risks (e.g., driving) than those imposed upon them (e.g., pollution), and that the acceptability of risk was acceptability of a risk relative to the third power of the perceived benefits.

Scholars from the environmental hazards tradition such as Kates and Kasperson raised questions about public perception of risk, together with an important body of work by psychologists such as Slovic and Fischhoff (Fischhoff et al. 1981, Kates and Clark 1977, Slovic 1987). Research demonstrated that people rank risks not only on scientific studies of the probability of harm, but also on how well the process is understood, its visibility and association with cancer, the degree of catastrophe, how equitably the danger is distributed, how well individuals can control their exposure, and whether risk is voluntary or imposed. These studies helped to explain why the public was so concerned about the risks of nuclear power or toxins in the environment in comparison to more frequent or serious risks from driving or smoking. Kasperson, one of the pioneers of research into technological hazard, proposed the concept of the ‘social amplification of risk’ and which suggested that the actions of the media, government, and nongovernmental organizations, as well as disputes among scientists, can significantly increase or decrease public risk concerns (Kasperson et al. 1988).

As a result of the relation to decision making, the processes of risk assessment have become a continuing and frequent preoccupation of advisory councils and committees in many countries and jurisdictions, such as the US National Research Council and the European Community.

4. Emerging Issues

Another set of social science research activities focused on the distribution of risks among social groups and across landscapes. This work showed the unequal distribution of the benefits and risks from technologies, and demonstrated the disproportionate exposure of poor and minority populations to environmental risks and hazards. This ‘environmental justice’ literature has continued to influence research on environmental risks and hazards.

Mapping the distribution of risks and vulnerability was facilitated by the development of computer-aided geographic information systems (GIS), which allowed for detailed spatial information on both physical and social variables to be integrated into databases and maps. These allowed the identification of hazard zones, and enabled a more rapid response to natural and technological disasters (Dangermond 1991). For example, GIS have been used to map earthquake hazards, droughts, and exposure to pollutants, and to facilitate more rapid response to emergencies by highlighting the spatial patterns of vulnerability and transport routes, as well as the location of key technical and human response and relief resources.

Social scientists also raised important issues about power and communication in risk assessment, analyzing the process by which certain groups were legitimized as experts, and the roles of scientists, government authorities, and the media in defining and managing risks (Beck 1992, Jasanoff 1993, Lash et al. 1996). The social constructionist perspective drew on discourse analysis to examine events such as the Bhopal chemical accident in India, and responses to the risks of bioengineering and climate change in terms of the framing of the debate, the use of language and imagery, and the use of science by different interest groups.

Growing demands for public participation in decisions about environmental risk fostered research on the role of nongovernmental organizations, and on models for involving stakeholders in both risk estimation techniques and management decisions. For example, research into the design and effectiveness of deliberative processes for formal and informal participation in decision making about risks provides a critical examination of different models of hearings and other forms of public input into decisions about location of hazardous facilities or development of pollution regulations.

Awareness of the potential of new global-scale environmental changes to alter the severity and pattern of environmental risks led some scholars to situate their research in the context of global climate and land use changes. Projections remain uncertain about how global warming might alter the frequency and intensity of meteorological hazards, or change the incidence of pollution at the local level. Nevertheless, researchers employed scenarios to estimate changes in hurricane risks associated with sea-level rise, or drought and epidemics associated with climate changes and their results contributed to international assessments of global change, such as those of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC 1991). The concept of vulnerability was another important contribution of risk and hazard research to global change studies, because it suggested the importance of socioeconomic context and conditions in determining the impacts of climate change or the causes of deforestation, and highlighted issues of distribution of impacts and the ability to adjust to changes (Liverman 1994).

Hazards and risks are created, responded to, and studied in a highly international context, whether it be the role of trade or climate change in transferring risks from one region to another, the complex patterns of governmental and nongovernmental flows of disaster relief and development assistance, or the collaborations of scientists from different countries in research. International organizations such as the UN Disaster Relief Organization, the International Council of Scientific Unions, and various multinational environmental and charitable groups such as Oxfam, coordinate research and response to environmental risks and hazards. For example, the 1990s were declared the International Decade for Natural Disaster Reduction (IDNDR), with the aim of reducing hazard losses worldwide through improved prediction and reduction of vulnerability.

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