Environmental Monitoring

Environmental Monitoring

Introduction

Human beings live on a restless, dynamic planet. Our settlements and livelihoods depend on Earth's variations and variability, past and present, in the form of geology, topography, climate, and the distribution of vegetation and freshwater. At the same time, these variations and variability pose potential threats, which are called natural hazards. Extreme movements in Earth's crust release energy experienced as earthquakes, volcanoes, and tsunamis on Earth. Climate extremes such as hurricanes release gigantic amounts of energy. Heat waves, blizzards, and ice storms are other climate extremes. Floods and mass movements such as landslides, rock fall, and snow avalanches are more localized but can be very destructive and deadly, as are tornadoes and lightning strikes. Drought is a slow-onset hazard but nevertheless associated at times with great economic cost and displacement of people (Lindell, 2008).

Root Causes of Disaster Risk

What accounts for the degree of social vulnerability, capacity for personal protection, and level of state investment in social protection and preventive action? While detailed answers vary from situation to situation, there are always root causes that can be traced back through the history of control over resources in a particular society and how political power was divided and used. These root causes take particular forms as policy decisions and institutions react to economic, political, and demographic pressures (Mileti, 1999). Focused in this way, historically established power relations (e.g., relations governing land tenure, access to capital and markets, and location decisions)—that is, the “root causes”—are translated by dynamic pressures into specific unsafe conditions: my building or my home under an unstable slope or you living in a zone of seismic activity and sending your child to a school that will likely collapse in an earthquake.

Links With Sustainable Development and Climate Change

Root causes of disaster vulnerability are also evident in the ways in which people exploit the natural environment. Possibly damaging natural processes may also take the form of “resources.” For this reason, people have settled and farmed on the fertile slopes of volcanoes and in the alluvium deposited by floods for millennia. While this dialectic of resource and resistance has been known for many years, other connections are not as widely appreciated. For example, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) and other authorities warn that climate change is very likely to bring with it more intense storms as well as more variability in rainfall (Tierney, 2001). Thus, not only ...