Hazard and vulnerability Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 500 words

Hazard and vulnerability - Essay Example The assumption that 'natural' disasters are inherently and predominantly natural phenomena has tended to exclude the social sciences from consideration in much of the spending that is done in disaster preparedness. This is despite the fact that over the last twenty years a considerable literature on disasters has emerged from human geography, sociology, anthropology and (to a lesser extent) economics. For many years, social science has contributed to policy formation for disasters (especially in the Third World) through the activities of many Non-Government Organisations (NGOs). The initial development of vulnerability analysis is then rooted in social science, and in a sense has constituted a political economy of disasters to the analysis of devastating events that are normally associated with natural hazards. At its most simplistic, vulnerability analysis asserts that for there to be a disaster there has to be not only a natural hazard, but also a vulnerable population. Much of the conventional work on disasters has been dominated by 'hard science', and has been a product of the prominence that natural phenomena have acquired in the disaster causation process. But this 'physicalist' approach is also a result of the social construction of disasters as events that demonstrate the human condition as subordinate to Nature.