Download Extreme Events and Disaster Risk Reduction

Extreme Events and Disaster Risk
Reduction: what are we not learning?
Introduction to the theme
Terry Cannon
Climate Change Team
Institute of Development Studies
Problem context:
Many people do not give priority to risks of
disasters, even when they face significant
risks they have already experienced, or that
have been predicted
• Why is knowledge of this not being used and
why is learning not happening in DRR?
• What are the barriers to learning, and why is
knowledge ignored or played down?
• What should be done to change this?
Reasons why people take risks
• People trade-off the risks to benefit from
livelihoods that are possible in
“dangerous” places
• Attitudes to risk, perceptions of risk, are
not in the “rational” box that outsiders and
experts like to use
• Cultural factors are crucial in many
people’s behaviour in the face of risk –
different rationalities...
Disaster Risk Reduction – divorced
from reality?
There is a significant gap between what DRR aims
at, and the willingness and ability of people to
respond
People do not behave in the way that disaster
managers expect them to behave, or want them
to behave…
If we are getting this wrong now, how much worse
will it be with climate change?
Two key aspects
1. Priorities and risk hierarchies
Outsiders’ ideas of disaster risk reduction are
not the same as those of the people they are
trying to help – different priorities
2. “Culture” and behaviours toward risk
Significant aspects of “culture” lead to people
having attitudes to risk that appear to be
“illogical”/ irrational, and which don’t fit the
“logical” approach of outside agencies
The empirical evidence for this “gap”
• All over the world, thousands of assessments of
community-level risk (VCA etc) have been done
by NGOs and Red Cross/Crescent
• In hardly any of these do the local people share
the risk priority of the outside agency that is
coming to help them to manage risk
• Yemen, Sundarbans…
Three main risks
mentioned to student
visitors 2011:
•Water becoming saline
•Attacks by pirates
•Being eaten by tigers…
This was an area badly
hit by Cyclones Sidr
(2007) and Aila (2009)
Hazardous places are livelihood places
• People often trade the risks of a place and
a hazard for the livelihood benefits, shared
culture & social capital of that location
– Volcanic soils
– Floods and soil fertility and fish
– Coasts for fishing, farming
– Water supplies and fault zones
– Pastures and herds
– Florida, California, Netherlands…
1. Priorities and risk hierarchy
• People give highest priority to proximate problems
and the need to cope with everyday issues
• Typical priorities (when asked about what risks
people face) are
– water supply, jobs, health problems & costs, security
(crime), school fees, traffic accidents
• The list is often different for males, females and
children
• Rarely do people include the risks that DRM
agencies bring to the community as their project
• This is sometimes even true for CBDRM projects by
NGOs
Risk hierarchy
EQ
Severe
flood
Land Tropical
Fire
slidecyclones
Flood Drought
Everyday life: poverty, illness,
hunger, water, traffic accidents
Extreme but
infrequent
“Little we can do about
them..”
Damaging &
within memory
Common &
coped with
Priorities !
“Any idiot can face a crisis. It
is day-to-day living that
wears you out.”
A character’s comment in The Wager (short story)
by Anton Chekhov
Disaster
Risk
Management
Development
Adaptation
to
climate change
Disaster
Risk
Management
Adaptation
to climate change
Development
Integration
is best when
it is done in the
context of development based on low-carbon approaches
La Paz Bolivia. Photo montage – Fabien Nathan
Photo: La Paz, Bolivia
Fabien Nathan
Photo: La Paz, Bolivia
Fabien Nathan
Photo: La Paz, Bolivia
Fabien Nathan
Photo: La Paz, Bolivia
Fabien Nathan
2. Significant aspects of “culture” & behaviour
lead to people having different attitudes to risk
Culture has effects on:
Household level:
• Willingness to engage in safe behaviour – house
structure, location
Household & community level:
• Attitudes to various types of social protection
Institutional level (“governance”):
• Behaviour of institutions for everyday processes (of
governance) or specifically for DRR
Mismatches, rationalities, expectations
• DRR institutions expect a “proper”, logical,
rational response from people that is
relevant to the high-level risk they face
• Disciplines that are relevant for DRR are
ignored (psychology, anthropology, public
health)
Nonsense some people believe on disasters
Hojjat ol-eslam Kazem Sediqi, the acting Friday
prayer leader in Tehran, said women should stick to
strict codes of modesty to protect themselves.
“Many women who do not dress modestly lead
young men astray and spread adultery in society
which increases earthquakes," he explained.
BBC News 20 April 2010
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/8631775.stm
Similar views expressed by Americans after
Hurricane Katrina disaster, and Haiti earthquake
“You can’t be a rationalist in an
irrational world. It’s not rational.”
Spoken by Dr Rance in a play by Joe Orton
(What the butler saw)
Problems in understanding risk behaviour
• We cannot be certain about the “rationality”
as a characteristic of human behaviour
– There are different human behaviours, not just
one “human nature”
– People may have evolved to value the art of
persuasion rather than the science of evidence
and argument (New Scientist Dan Jones
26/5/12)
– Emotion may be more significant than
rationality (and may lead to better decisions…)
– Americans and nuclear safety maps…
• Level of wealth appears to affect empathy &
altruism – wealth reduces it, poorer status
increases it; (Bond, New Scientist 21/4/12)
• People do not necessarily respond to
financial incentives in “rational” ways (Sandel,
What money can’t buy: the moral limits of
markets, 2012, review Guardian 19/5/12)
• Poor people have higher levels of cortisol,
which produces stress and impairs control of
impulse (Banerjee, Poor Economics, 2011)
No choice –
have to live in
dangerous
places
Less choice
Essential
livelihoods
are in
dangerous
places
Choosing to
live in
dangerous
places
More choice
Disasters are still all socially constructed
“Culture”
• Fitting in / peer acceptance / tradition
• Access to social capital, Honour, Esteem (Maslow)
• Ontological security – stable mental state
– Significant in pre- and post-disaster behaviours
• Territorial functioning
“…an interlocked system of sentiments, cognitions, and
behaviors that are highly place-specific, and socially and
culturally determined and maintaining. Ralph Taylor
1988
• Culture as both a negative and positive aspect of risk
reduction
– “Traditions are group efforts to keep the unexpected from
happening”. Barbara Tober
• All are inter-related
Peer Group
Individual
characteristics
Shared Culture
(not static –
operates in the
wider
politicaleconomic
context)
Power
systems:
• Actors
• Competitors
• External
forces
& changes
Conceptual approaches
• Culture and belief; perception of risk, embedded
“evolutionary” behaviours, epigenetic factors
• Culture as dialectic – relations between outside/inside,
older/younger, formally educated/ non-educated:
dynamic not static
• Religion, fatalism, pre-determination, versus agency
• Gender as interface between biology, culture,
personality, psychology, upbringing, education…
• Personality, emotions, family and upbringing
• Psychology, group behaviour, peer pressure, responses
to inequality (game theory)
• Inequality as key driver of behaviour (work of Richard
Wilkinson & Kate Pickett)