A natural disaster is defined by the UN as: “the consequences of events triggered by natural hazards that overwhelm local response capacity and seriously affect the social and economic development of a region.” In other words, if an earthquake takes place on an uninhabited island and no one is affected, it is not a natural disaster. In order to be a disaster, people must be affected. Similarly, if flooding takes place in an area where there is adequate preparation, it probably isn’t a natural disaster. If a similar level of flooding, however, takes place in an area where there isn’t preparation and crops are ruined and people are forced to abandon their homes, it then can be a natural disaster. Similarly, heavy rainfalls occur in many parts of the world. Normally, they are not natural disasters, but when the rainfall is heavier than usual and when precautions have not been taken, a natural disaster can result. The rainfall itself is not the disaster, but rather the consequences of the rainfall.
There are two additional aspects of natural disasters that need to be explored before engaging in discussion of human rights and natural disasters.
First, just how ‘natural’ are ‘natural disasters?’ The distinction if often made between natural disasters – such as flooding – and man-made disasters, such as an oil spill or chemical accident. But often the consequences of natural disasters are worse because of human involvement. To use two examples from my own country: in the 1930s, terrible dust storms in the middle of the United States devastated the lives of inhabitants. For year after year, there was little rainfall, and the topsoil of a major area of the country simply blew away, leaving a swathe of desert. While the lack of rainfall was a natural phenomenon, the fact that a period of intense settlement had converted enormous grasslands into wheat fields and that farmers had plowed up the earth, exposing the soil to the wind was directly responsible for the disaster. If the farmers hadn’t settled in the region, if they hadn’t plowed up the ground, there would not have been a natural disaster. A second more recent example is Hurricane Katrina which displaced over a million people in New Orleans and the Gulf coast in 2005. While the hurricane was a natural phenomenon, the fact that the Louisiana wetlands had been destroyed by developers in past decades eliminated a natural barrier for the hurricane. Without the wetlands, the Hurricane moved in full force to populated areas, thus causing the disaster. In other words, human actions frequently turn natural weather events into disaster. On this continent, there are many stories of drought which led to famine and disaster, e.g. Ethiopia in 1984-85, where the famine was a least partly the result of government policies. In fact, Amartya Sen has argued that democracies never experience famine because the political pressures force governments to take actions to prevent droughts or other calamities that would otherwise lead to famine.
A second aspect of natural disasters concerns the speed at which they occur. A rapid-onset disaster includes earthquakes, flooding, hurricanes, cyclones, etc. Slow-onset disasters, particularly droughts, develop over a period of time. This gives more time for precautions to be undertaken and for governments and the international community to mitigate the effects of a change in climate. In Southern Africa in 1992 where terrible drought occurred, famine was averted because of policies undertaken by governments in the region and by the international community.
It is generally easier to mobilize international support for sudden-onset disasters; in disasters with high media coverage, there is usually an outpouring of support which is not usually manifest for slow-onset disasters. The outpouring of support for the victims of the 2004 tsunamis, for example, dwarfed the response to victims of flooding in Bangladesh earlier in the year.