Are natural disasters man-made?

General Studies Paper 1

Introduction

• Torrential rains in several parts of north India, particularly Himachal Pradesh and Uttarakhand, damaged highways and buildings, and took hundreds of lives. While a warming Arctic is said to be a cause for the unusually heavy rains, years of haphazard planning and construction have multiplied the tragedy.

Natural calamities

• Every year, particularly in the monsoon, we witness extreme natural calamities.
• The scale of natural disasters that we now see across the world are definitely man-made.
• Some sections of the population are more vulnerable to them and more at risk than others.
• We need to figure out systems and solutions that can be channelised specifically towards this large pool of people. We need to build stronger systems from the bottom up and learn to do it collectively.

Role of humans

• Humans have played an important role in enhancing the risk from climate hazards.
• The frequency and intensity of hazards have increased, and anthropogenic climate change has played a major role in that.
• We have built on floodplains, encroached water bodies, and planned our cities without thinking about sustainability. So, humans are responsible.
• Not fully, but we have played a considerable part in increasing the problem. But we should find solutions and learn from our failures.

Disaster preparedness

• There are a few different ways in which the landscape of disasters in India has changed.
• We are constantly talking about the importance of urban planning and how the movement of people to urban centres has affected natural landscapes.
• Some [landscapes] have changed drastically and exceeded their carrying capacity and this has exacerbated the extent of loss and damage in these areas.
• If we consider the historical development of cities everywhere, it is the story of urbanisation.
• Increased population density means greater dependence on fossil fuel and greater climate-disruptive anthropogenic forces.

Suggestions

• Development translates to infrastructure growth. However, we don’t pay enough attention to whether our development pathways are sustainable.
• Sustainability means emphasising not only economics, but also society and environment. Any sustainable development will consider the environmental implications.
• So far, we have just run behind the economics, you know, the land holdings, finding cheaper land, filling the water bodies, removing palaeochannels (deep underground stores of groundwater) and destroying natural drainage systems.
• The only solution is adopting the Sustainable Development Goals, implementing careful urban planning, and creating roads and streets keeping these in mind.
• It comes down to understanding that there are no quick-fix solutions to what we are going through; we will have to think about long-term risk assessments, vulnerability assessments, and understand how socioeconomic drivers are worsening the problem in certain communities compared to others in the city.

Way forward

• Often, we don’t have a complete record that informs planners about current and upcoming disasters.
• Data sets are often pretty old and do not directly provide sufficient information about the future.
• There are excellent institutions even within the government that are constantly monitoring and understanding the scale of the climate crisis in terms of rainfall patterns, trends, and the ways in which risk is becoming more pronounced in certain regions versus others.

We have to analyse the implications of imposing a strict carrying capacity in certain regions and not allowing for more urbanisation to happen in certain areas or restricting certain ways in which infrastructure is built.