Understanding the root causes of natural disasters

The social characteristics of communities are extremely important for hazard managers because they increase peoples’ vulnerability to hazards. Understandably, socially disadvantaged communities exposed to hazards have to date received the most attention from DRR specialists. This is because hazards tend to harm predominantly those social groups that were already disadvantaged before a disaster. Large focus has been placed on “underdeveloped” or “developing” nations, where the social disadvantage factors are particularly obvious. But groups of people living in places where the overall socio-economic status is higher can also be vulnerable to hazards, and little is known about these groups. The assumption that all members of affluent societies are somehow immune to disasters seems to be broadly shared, perhaps because vulnerability may be less obvious. In fact, making inferences about disaster vulnerability based on aggregated economic characteristics often leads to misleading conclusions.