AGCI Session I: Natural Hazards and Global Change

Session Chairs: Louis Walter and E. L. Quarantelli - July 10 to 20, 1996

William Hooke

On the relationship between natural hazards and global change

Much of the climate data we have today comes from natural hazard monitoring over the past century. The costs of observing systems for global change studies are heavily front-end loaded, while benefits can be realized only after many years. By upgrading our present hazard monitoring networks, we can provide a stream of benefits, completely transforming the cost-benefit equation.

Because we have only one Earth, global change presents the need to make policy decisions right the first time. Yet we are a species that learns only from practice; we can't even cook an egg right the first time. Myriad natural disaster scenarios worldwide represent the global change challenge in microcosm. A floodplain facing repeated inundations, an urban area atop a seismically active fault zone, an agricultural belt facing interannual variability each includes the mix of natural threat, varied impacts, and complex social dimensions that mirror the global change problem. The same physical threats in urban and rural settings, and in a diversity of cultural settings provide literally thousands of scenarios worldwide. The relatively high frequency of natural hazards and the wide variety of scenarios mean that opportunities for trial and error, learning from experience, and testing of hypotheses are virtually unlimited.

Since there are winners and losers in every global change scenario, these issues tend to polarize nations, especially driving a wedge between developed and developing nations. One sore point is that the "haves" also have more data and expertise regarding the causes and likely outcomes of global changes than the "have-nots." Natural hazards, on the other hand, can bring nations together, and sharing data and expertise on natural disaster reduction can help to reduce divisiveness.

If the nations of the world devote the next few decades to building up local resilience to natural extremes, we would likely find that we had built up worldwide resilience to small changes in the global averages.

Return to Text // Aspen Global Change Institute Homepage // Elements of Change 1996 Table of Contents // Comments & Questions: agcimail@agci.org