Pri's blog

This may be a strange thing to say after the recent devastating landslide in the Meeriyabedde Tea Plantation  in Koslanda that occupied our thoughts in the last couple of weeks, but there is no such thing as a ‘natural’ disaster.  What we have are natural hazards.    The disaster that follows a natural hazard, whether it is a tsunami,  earthquake, flood, drought, cyclone or landslide depends on  how much impact the hazard has on  people, assets and the environment.   The numbers of people and assets that are damaged by the  occurrence of the natural hazard turns the event into a disaster.  The  damage  of course is largely dependent on the choices we make about how we use our land, how we build our buildings, what kind of government we have, and how our financial system works. Disaster risk is seen as the frequency and severity of the hazard, the numbers of people and assets exposed to the hazard and ...

The Human Development Report 2014 is entitled Sustaining human progress: Reducing vulnerabilities and Building Resilience, and if nothing else has foregrounded two of the key concepts in the current development discourse i.e. vulnerability and resilience. The concept of vulnerability In discussing vulnerability, the HDR aims to move beyond the traditional concept of vulnerability that comes from the disaster risk reduction discourse and  which is about exposure to risk and risk management including insuring against shocks and diversifying assets and incomes,    to what it calls ‘human vulnerability’ which is the prospects of eroding peoples’ capabilities and choices.  This definition can be linked to the idea of peoples’ agency, and also to Sen’s idea of entitlement  and serve to broaden the policy debate .   But unfortunately, at the outset itself the HDR then reduces human vulnerability to a categorisation of ‘who’ is vulnerable, ‘what’ th...