Tag Archives: natural

Natural disasters, avoidable or unpredictable?

We’ve all seen the images. And they are incredible. Like many natural disasters.

On 25 January, Niscemi, a small Sicilian town, split in two, after the torrential rains associated with Storm Harry, leaving a scar several kilometres long. We saw roads collapsing, cars vanishing, houses left hanging on the edge of a void. More than 1,600 people were evacuated. In the Guardian article, we are reminded that this was not the first time. We are told that the very same area had already slid in the 18th century, and again in 1997, and yet construction continued, especially from the 1950s and 1960s onwards.

Could we have known? Did we already know? And if we did, why does it still happen? Almost inevitably, after every natural disaster, I find that these questions come back too, again and again… I thought I could write a short post to recall that, on the one hand, there are striking regularities in the way some disasters unfold. But on the other hand, “predictable” does not mean “avoidable”, because disaster is also a social fact, a story of vulnerability, exposure, and public choices (at the risk of repeating myself, I know).
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More and more natural catastrophes…

A few weeks ago (here, or there, among many others) I discussed shortly the increase of the frequency of natural catastrophes. An example is perhaps Australia, with major droughts over the past 10 years; a summer heat wave in Victoria, Australia, caused the massive bushfire in 2009; the flooding in Queensland this winter, as well as a huge cyclone. So it looks like Australia is experiencing that increase of the frequency of natural catastrophes.

Nature published last week a series of interesting papers on natural catastrophes (and its relation with a human factor). Increased flood risk linked to global warming by Quirin Schiermeier (likelihood of extreme rainfall may have been doubled by rising greenhouse-gas levels);Climate change: Human influence on rainfall by Richard P. Allan including some Letter by Min and another Letter by Pall; Human contribution to more-intense precipitation extremes by Seung-Ki Min,et al; and Anthropogenic greenhouse gas contribution to flood risk in England and Wales in autumn 2000 by Pardeep Pall et al.