Environmental Disasters and Risks

I. Key Concepts
Environmental disasters occur when three things come together: population
exposure to an environmental hazard, conditions of vulnerability in that
population and its environment, and insufficient capacity to reduce or cope with
negative consequences.
Environmental hazards that lead to disasters may be natural or technological.
The hazards that cause disasters may vary greatly, but the public health consequences
and the public health and medical needs of affected populations tend to be
relatively consistent across disaster types.
Disaster risk is the product of the probability of disaster occurrence and the
probability of a vulnerable population becoming affected minus the absorptive
capacity of that population.
Disaster risk management is a comprehensive, all-hazard approach that entails
developing and implementing strategies for all phases of the disaster life cycle—
prevention, mitigation, preparedness, response, and recovery—in the context of
sustainable development.

A disaster is "a serious disruption of the functioning of a community or a society

causing widespread human, material, economic or environmental losses that
exceed the ability of the affected community or society to cope using its own
resources" (United Nations Offce for Disaster Risk Reduction [UNISDR] , 2009).
A disruption that does not exceed a community's or society's capacity to cope is
classified as an emergency. Emergencies and disasters are thus part of a continuum
and differ only by their degree of severity.

Disaster consequences may include loss of life, injury, disease, and other negative
effects on human physical, mental, and social well-being, together with damage to
property, destruction of assets, loss of services, social and economic disruption, and
environmental degradation. The severity of the consequences is referred to as the
disaster impact.

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 TABLE 1 A Typology of Environmental Disasters
Natural Technological
Drought Nuclear
Chemical
Wildfires
Hydrometeorologica
Heat waves Toxic
l Radiological
Storms
Floods Fires
Geophysical Earthquakes
Landslides
Thermal
Volcanic
eruptions Explosions

Tsunamis Mechanical Transport

accidents

II. DISASTER RISK AND ITS DETERMINANTS

Risk is the probability that something will cause injury or harm. While risk can rarely be
completely eliminated, it can be managed. Risk management is activity directed toward
assessing, controlling, and monitoring risks. In risk management, evidence on risk factors
is collected and analyzed, risks in particular contexts are assessed, and control measures
are implemented, using standard strategies. Plhe risk of disaster-related morbidity and
mortality is a complex function of factors both extrinsic and intrinsic to the individual.

 Extrinsic Factors Affecting Disaster Risk

Extrinsic disaster risk factors relate to exposure and capacity. Exposure is defined as
contact with a potentially dangerous hazard, such as wind from tornadoes, water from
floods, or heat from heat waves. Capacity is the combination of all external resources that
can be deployed to minimize morbidity and mortality following exposure. Capacity
includes four major categories of resources: economic resources (e.g., occupation,
income, savings, and health insurance); material resources (e.g., emergency equipment
and supplies, food and water, medicines, health care; transportation, shelter, and quality
of housing and the built environment); behavioral resources (e.g., emergency plans,
mutual aid agreements, memoranda of understanding, and communication plans); and
sociopolitical resources (e.g., social support and capital, political representation, and
formal and informal communication networks).
 Intrinsic factors Affecting Disaster Risk
Intrinsic risk factors for disaster-related morbidity and mortality include attributes related
to human vulnerability. Vulnerability includes four major categories of attributes:
demographics (e.g., age, gender, and family position); education and personal experience
(e.g., educational level and disaster training); race, language, and ethnicity (e.g., minority
status in the affected population and language barriers); and health status (e.g., chronic

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illness, physical disability, malnutrition, mental illness, and dependence upon life-
sustaining treatment).
Epidemiological studies following disasters have pinpointed some of these risk factors.
One of the best-known examples is a study of the 1995 Chicago heat wave (Klinenberg,
2002). During that disaster, mortality was elevated among socially isolated, elderly, inner-
city African American populations; other risk factors included low-quality housing and
lack of air conditioning. In general, poverty may be the single most important risk factor
for vulnerability to all environmental disasters (%omas, Phillips, Lovekamp, Fothergill,
& Toole, 2013). For example, as discussed in Chapter 1 1, dangerous facilities such as
chemical plants, with their attendant risk of accidents, are disproportionately concentrated
in poor and/or minority communities (Elliott, Wang, Lowe, & Kleindorfer, 2004).
Similarly, the overwhelming majority of casualties in the Bhopal, India, disaster occurred
among extremely poor day laborers (Mehta, 1990).

III. MANAGING DISASTER RISK

Disaster risk management applies the general principles of risk management to disasters.
Risk management has standard operational categories, including risk avoidance, risk
reduction, risk transfer, and risk retention. Emergency managers think in terms of a
different set of categories: prevention, mitigation, preparedness, response, and recovery.
And public health professionals, with a prevention orientation, often think in terms of
primary, secondary, and tertiary prevention.
Disaster risk management is a comprehensive approach that entails developing and
implementing strategies for each phase of the disaster life cycle. emphasis on a life cycle
approach, beginning well before a disaster and continuing through the aftermath, is
important in all disasters. While the depiction of disasters as cyclical may seem to imply
that disasters are inevitable, this is not the case. The goals of risk avoidance and risk
reduction are to avert disasters and retained risk, thus breaking the disaster cycle. ultimate
goal of disaster risk management is to break the disaster life cycle.

Disaster Risk Transfer

Disaster risk transfer includes such mechanisms as insurance contracts and risk retention
pools. By purchasing an insurance contract, people are able to transfer and share risk
across a large population. Risk retention pools are similar; but instead of assessing
premiums in advance, these pools assess losses across all members of the group once they
occur.

IV. Morbidity Associated with Environmental Disasters

TABLE 2 Major Causes of Death During Environmental Disasters

Natural Technological
Drought Malnutrition Chemical release Poisoning, asphyxia
Asphyxiation, burns,
Wildfires Poisonings Poisoning
toxic exposures
Heat waves Heat stroke, Nuclear Traumatic injury,

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 exacerbations of burns, radiation
cardiovascular disease illness
Storms Drowning, traumatic
injury Radiological Radiation illness
Floods Drowning
Earthquakes Traumatic injury, Fires Burns, asphyxia
asphyxia
Landslides Traumatic injury, Explosions Traumatic injury,
asphyxia burns
Volcanic Traumatic injury, burns, Transportation Traumatic injury,
eruptions toxic exposures accidents burns, drowning
Tsunamis Drowning, traumatic
injury Traumatic injury,
Structural collapse
asphyxia
Cold weather Hypothermia
Sources: Bailey & Walker, 2007; Bertazzi, 1989; Binder, 1989; Centers for Disease
Control and Prevention, 1983, 1993, 1998, 2002; Chowdhury et al., 1992; Cronin &
Sharp, 2002; Duclos, Sanderson, Thompson, Brackin, & Binder, 1987; Floret, Viel,
Mauny, Hoen, & Piarroux, 2006; Guha-Sapir & van Panhuis, 2005; Hull,
Grindlinger, Hirsch, Petrone, & Burke, 1985; International Federation of Red Cross
and Red Crescent Societies, 2007; Keim, 2002, 2008; Lillibridge, 1997; Malilay,
1997; Mehta, Mehta, Mehta, & Makhijani, 1 990; Sanderson, 1992, 1997; Sattler et
al., 2002; Toole, 1997; World Health Organization, 2009.