Extreme Events and Disaster Risk Reduction: what are we not learning?

Introduction to the theme

Terry CannonClimate 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…

Sunderabans

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

Extreme but infrequent“Little we can do about them..”

Damaging & within memory

Common & coped with

EQ

Landslide

Fire

DroughtFlood

Tropical

cyclones

Severeflood

Everyday life: poverty, illness,hunger, water, traffic accidents 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

DisasterRisk

Management

Adaptation to

climate change

Development

Development

DisasterRisk

Management

Adaptation to climate change

Integrationis 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

Essential livelihoods

are in dangerous

places

Choosing to live in

dangerous places

Less choice 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

Powersystems:• Actors

• Competitors• External

forces& changes

Shared Culture(not static –

operates in thewider

political-economic

context)

Peer Group

Individual characteristics

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)