The Disaster Profiteers: How Natural Disasters Make the Rich Richer and the Poor Even Poorer

by John C. Mutter

  In The Natural History of Destruction, W. G. Sebold writes of how people emerged from the ruins of their shattered homes after the Allied firebombing raids on German cities at the end of World War II and immediately began getting about their lives, straightening what could be straightened, and opening shops and businesses if they could. Banks reopened within a week. Sebold tells of a woman who was sweeping and tidying the entrance to a half-destroyed movie theater, getting ready for the matinee show the day after a bombing raid, though it likely would never take place, given the damage to the theater.15

  The traditional role of natural scientists—climatologists, seismologists, volcanologists, and others—has been to estimate the timing and magnitude of natural extremes or natural hazards, as they are typically called, not the magnitudes of disasters. The difference isn’t trivial. If an earthquake at the top end of the geophysical magnitude scale occurred above the Arctic Circle in Siberia, it probably would not kill anyone or damage any structures, so it would not be a disaster of any magnitude. The earthquake that took tens of thousands of lives in Haiti was far from the top of the magnitude scale, but it was a disaster of massive scale. The magnitude of the physical event does not predict the magnitude of the disaster very well at all.

  Hazard has a formal definition also, of course. Cambridge’s online dictionary explains the word as something that is dangerous and likely to cause harm. In almost all definitions, the words danger, risk, and unavoidable appear. Disasters, in contrast, are thought of as avoidable. A natural hazard is one in which the danger is presented by Nature. Almost all definitions have a tone of fatalism. The word for hazard in French is hasard and has a broader suite of synonyms than in English, including coincidence, but the deep sense of the inevitability remains. The unavoidability of a hazard and the avoidability of a disaster are implicit in almost all discussions of natural disasters, in the academic literature and in disaster risk reduction (DRR) strategies in UN agencies and within the numerous organizations tasked with disaster mitigation.

  With information on hazard distribution, natural scientists also participate in disaster studies by finding ways to estimate natural hazard risk. Using records of past events, they try to map out the regions most likely to experience earthquakes, storms, landslides, and the like. Governments can use this information to make strategic investments in hazard mitigation projects where they will have the most benefit. The World Bank and regional development banks are very interested in this research as well (and have funded hazard assessments) because they often fund mitigation projects or support reconstruction costs following disasters, particularly in poorer countries.

  Economists use the term moral hazard to mean the temptation to take greater risk because another party will bear the consequences of that risk taking.16 It is used a little more broadly than that in conversations among economists.

  Social scientists most often study disaster phases 1 or 3 or both. That’s because this is where human judgment, human actions or inactions, social systems, politics, and institutions most come into play. Social scientists study human reactions during phase 2 as well as the organization of humanitarian relief and the organization and motivation of donor contributions. But social scientists in general do not attempt to predict when disasters will occur or how consequential they will be. Their work most often involves understanding human behaviors and suggesting policy formulations that might lead to a reduction in the social harm disasters bring.

  While there may be no bright lines drawn between each of the three disaster phases, high barriers mark the disjunction between the social and the natural sciences. Generally the two live in very different worlds; certainly they do in academia. Few social science departments, for instance, have a natural scientist on the faculty, and few if any natural science departments have a social scientist on the faculty. The two are almost immiscible. Although the two areas of intellectual inquiry thrive in their different worlds, their separation creates significant issues for our objective: understanding all phases of natural disasters.

  The problem is an old one. In the decades after World War II, scientists such as Richard Feynman, Niels Bohr, Albert Einstein, and others were popular heroes. They were often asked to give opinions on all manner of subjects that had little to do with their fields, and they ventured their opinions on politics, religion, and many more subjects. Feynman, the great nuclear physicist, was publicly vocal on a wide range of topics. One thing he argued was that the doing of science was “doing good.” Others—politicians, for instance—may make bad use of the knowledge that comes from science, but creating that knowledge remains a good action. That idea has many adherents still.

  British scientist C. P. Snow is most often quoted on the subject of the standoff between science and other intellectual pursuits at the time when science and scientists commanded high regard and public support.17 In his famous Rede Lecture of 1959, “The Two Cultures,” Snow referred to science and humanities; but from the perspective of a natural scientist, he could have been discussing science and almost anything else that isn’t science.

  Feynman actually wanted a Snowvian separation to exist between the work of science and how science is used by those who are not scientists. He, along with many other physicists, had worked on the Manhattan Project at Los Alamos, New Mexico, which built the first atomic bomb. Many of them felt huge guilt and remorse for it. Feynman wanted to separate the act of building the bomb from the decision to drop it, a decision that the Los Alamos scientists did not make. He wanted to draw a bright line—I called it the Feynman line in the introduction—between the work of an atomic physicist and the work of an atomic bomb. And he really wanted to say (and he was not alone in this) that scientists should be left to do anything they please in splendid isolation and that whatever negative consequences unfold aren’t their fault. In other words, if the consequences are good for society, scientists revel in the praise that comes; if the consequences are bad, that is someone else’s doing. Feynman thought social problems were much harder to solve than regular science problems because there were no physical principles to call on, no formulas to derive and solve that would resolve the problems.

  But the most serious problems of our time lie at the nexus of the physical and the social worlds. They are on neither side of the Feynman line; they sit right on it. Climate change is the leading example: Science gives us an understanding of the effect of greenhouse gases but does not tell us how to deal with them. And think about the problem of continued poverty in today’s world, the problem of massive economic inequality. What prevents the poor from breaking out of their terrible situation and enjoying the benefits of prosperity? If some can do it, why can’t everyone? There is no simple answer, and many factors are cited that are social in nature. Governance, institutions, and corruption are leading causes. But poverty must be a physical phenomenon as well as a social one; why else would poverty today be concentrated in the tropics? That’s no accident of history. Why would the actions of Nature be harsher on the poor than on the rich? Why is it that only the poorest among us are brutalized by famine when there is more than enough food in the world to feed us all?

  When thousands of children and their teachers die in schoolrooms during an earthquake in China, scientists will say it is because building codes are lax, and they scold the politicians for not making or enforcing stricter codes. The old adage holds true—earthquakes don’t kill people, buildings kill people. (Chapter 2 discusses this in more depth.) Those who live in countries prone to earthquakes are the very last people who need to be told that. They know earthquakes are inevitable hazards, but the deaths of schoolchildren should not be inevitable. Natural scientists can answer the question of how the children died but not why they died. Why are building codes, or their enforcement, often so lax in places so prone to earthquakes? That is a question for social scientists.

  Since most natural scientists remain with their colleagues, where they are most
comfortable, the result is that a lot of what passes for science on the nonscience side of the Feynman line isn’t science at all. You could call it scienciness, a riff on Stephen Colbert’s truthiness—things that are felt to be true and might even be true but are often factually incorrect and not logically true. They do not come from the works of science, but they sound like science. These assertions are attempts, often quite genuine, by people not trained in science to communicate some important issue where science has played a part.

  But the general reserve and guardedness of many scientists—often out of a fear of being misquoted, which does indeed happen quite frequently—leaves open a space that can be filled with whatever tidbit of science-sounding information that appears to support a position erected for political and other reasons. The debate on climate change in the United States is a leading example. Those who wish to argue against action to reduce greenhouse gas emissions have not made a thorough study of the extensive analyses of climate research available from the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. They have adopted a view that their standard of living will be diminished if any action is taken. People in Congress who represent states where fossil fuel–based industries are a significant part of the economy push that idea very hard and receive considerable funding from those industries to propagate this case. People like the Koch brothers can always dredge up some sliver of information or equivocation on the part of a scientist (or someone who sounds like one) somewhere and twist it to indicate that any action would be a mistake. Senator James Inhofe’s book, The Greatest Hoax: How the Global Warming Conspiracy Threatens Your Future, and the entire genre of climate change denial books is based on this sort of scienciness. If you have your mind made up already, you will believe what books like these say and even convince yourself that they are based on science.

  Many experts and nonexperts will tell you that disasters are actually increasing both in frequency and in severity and that we should expect that trend to continue. They mean that the number of disaster events—phase 2 of disasters—is increasing, because the events are reasonably easy to count. Part of the reason for the growing number of events, it is said, is that our climate is changing for the worse, bringing with it more meteorological extremes. In the United States, more than half of the population apparently believes that disasters are indeed increasing, and half of that number believe that it is evidence of the “End Times,” the time before the apocalypse and the second coming of Christ.18 Only a minority in the United States believes disasters are increasing due to climate change.

  The most authoritative source for disaster statistics is the Emergency Events Database (EM-DAT) compiled by the Center for Research on the Epidemiology of Disasters (CRED), a group based at the School of Public Health at the Catholic University of Louvain in Brussels.19 EM-DAT data for 1960 shows about 50 disasters per year. That figure rocketed up to 450 per year in 2010, an almost tenfold increase. (When meteorological disasters are treated as a group, it’s not so bad: the increase is about fourfold.) The temperature change from 1960 to 2010 was less than 1°Celsius. Although aspects of the climate system are very sensitive to small changes in temperature, there is no basis in climate science to support a fourfold increase in weather extremes as a response to a globally averaged temperature increase of less than 1°C.

  In 1960, there were about 3 billion people on Earth; by 2010, there were almost 7 billion. Thus, the number of people more than doubled in 50 years. By simple logic, you could argue that population increase might cause a bit more than twice as many disasters if the number of natural extreme events themselves stayed constant. But if EM-DAT is right, there are nearly ten times as many disasters. To make these two increases jibe, you would have to suppose that most of the population increase occurred in the most dangerous places on the planet rather than in places where there are few disasters.

  But that isn’t the case. Populations are swelling in some dangerous places. Cities are growing at a very rapid rate, and many are in coastal regions and subject to tropical cyclones. Some coastal regions, such as those of Latin America, the US West Coast, and Japan, are also prone to earthquakes. But populations are also growing rapidly in many places that are not especially dangerous. And if population increase alone was the answer, then the increase in all forms of disasters would be the same.

  If the number of disasters has increased because of population increase, surely the number of deaths would have gone up by the same tenfold factor as the disasters. But the number of deaths per disaster has actually decreased. We are safer from disasters now than we have ever been. The drop in deaths per disaster is about sixfold, from around 120,000 deaths per disaster in 1975 to around 20,000 today. That’s a remarkable improvement in people’s safety. The world is not becoming a more dangerous place to live; it is becoming a safer place!

  The most important factor in the decline in fatalities per event is the well-known effect of poverty on disaster fatalities. Poor people live in fragile, poorly built homes, often in marginal lands like the barrios that cover the slopes behind so many cities in Latin America. Many lack public transportation and rarely own cars or motorcycles or even bicycles, so they settle in near where they can get work, often in floodplains or on riverbanks, unaware of or reluctantly accepting of the dangers. Their wealthy employers know the dangers of such places and never live there. They live in the well-planned, well-serviced, well-policed cities with gentle terrain and rows of trees, lawns, and open parklands.

  David Stromberg at the Institute for International Economic Studies in Stockholm has run regressions (the central tool of econometrics) of income against the number of deaths and finds a robust relationship with high reliability.20 For the same geophysical type of event, high-income countries have only 30 percent as many deaths as low-income countries. Stromberg estimated that had the economic development that occurred globally in the last 40 years of the twentieth century not taken place, the number of disaster deaths would be around 20 percent greater than they are today. Continued development should further reduce disaster risk and fatalities. The wealthier we get, the safer we are, so the best DRR strategy is to become wealthy. An article in the Economist that discussed the economics of natural disasters ended with this: “The lesson for poorer countries is that growth is the best disaster-mitigation policy of all.”21 Perhaps that’s what you might expect the Economist to say, but in this case Stromberg’s figures do support the claim.

  It’s easy enough to understand why. Along with the fragility of poor people’s dwellings (in part due to lack of building codes and/or their enforcement), poor countries typically have weak or absent institutions that could help prepare for disasters and reduce harm. They rarely have agencies like FEMA, or a developed science institution like the US Geological Survey with large numbers of seismologists who study earthquake hazards, or climate scientists in the National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) who study cyclones. Those institutions are the rewards of wealth and are part of what protects the wealthy from disaster.

  One thing we can say with some certainty about natural disasters is that they take lives, sometimes in tragically large numbers, and many more in poor places than in others. Every effort we can make to avoid these deaths is an effort worth making, through the DRR work of the UN or others. That said, death tolls are actually quite difficult to estimate with any accuracy. You can’t be sure of any reported figures, and, of course, deaths are harder to estimate in poor places. You can’t just count bodies the way Quartermaster General Montgomery Meigs did after the US Civil War. He searched all the Civil War battlefields, disinterred the bodies of all the slain Union soldiers from the rough, shallow graves dug quickly by their comrades, and made as accurate a count as he could.22 But even Meigs didn’t count Confederate soldiers or civilians.23

  Disaster deaths are always highly political. The government of Myanmar rarely reports disaster deaths, and the government of North Korea almost
never does. No international agency is charged with finding out just exactly how many die, because such a task would be an infringement on sovereignty, so we have to rely on country reports. CRED does the best job of figuring out what deaths have occurred, but it acknowledges significant uncertainties. In Myanmar, international media attention forced the government to acknowledge that they had a disaster on their hands days after Cyclone Nargis made landfall in 2008, but no one seriously believes that country leaders accurately reported the deaths, and it is widely believed that the numbers were much higher than official government figures. Large fatality figures would seem to suggest that the government is not in control, and complete control is one of the central missions of authoritarian governments like the junta in Myanmar; so too for North Korea.

  Queasiness about reporting embarrassingly large death figures is not the sole province of authoritarian, xenophobic governments. Eric Klinenberg wrote a classic study of the 1995 heat wave in Chicago, during which Mayor Richard M. Daley challenged figures from the county’s chief medical examiner that had been widely reported in the media. Daley said, “It’s hot. . . . But let’s not blow it out of proportion. . . . Every day people die of natural causes. You cannot claim that everybody who has died in the last eight or nine days died of heat. Then everybody in the summer that dies will die of heat.”24 The mayor was suggesting that the number was lower than the 521 that the medical examiner had determined. The final figure was calculated to be 739.

  There’s nothing new in this. In his excellent book about the High Plains blizzard of 1888, The Children’s Blizzard, David Laskin writes of the debate about the death toll from that tragic event: “In the national press an unseemly brawl had broken out over the number of blizzard deaths.” A federal judge had asserted that “Dakota papers were deliberately underestimating and ‘covering up’ the truth about loss of life.”25 The judge claimed the figure might be 1,000, while newspapers reported 300. The judge thought there was a cover-up to prevent the Dakota Territory from getting a bad name, which might dissuade people from moving there. At the time, the blizzard was consistently treated as a freak of Nature, one that was never going to return. Now we know better.