At Risk

"Because it provided a revolutionary shift in the way that people think about natural disasters. It was published in 1994 and it was the first to suggest that disaster recovery is not just about physical reconstruction – it also has a social dimension. One of the authors, Piers Blaikie, argues that disasters have a differential impact on those it affects. Poor people are likely to be more affected by a natural disaster than rich people, the latter of whom tend to overcome the loss more quickly. For example, when discussing flood recovery, Blaikie and the three contributors urge readers not to begin by thinking of the issue of water, but to start with vulnerability. Why is it that some people are living in low-lying land that is susceptible to flooding? Perhaps it’s because somebody else grabbed the people’s land, forcing them to move elsewhere. This book details a theoretical model called the crunch model, which in my opinion remains the most powerful way of understanding the impact of disasters. It’s very simple: imagine a group of vulnerable people living on low land – the hazard is obviously water. When the vulnerability and hazard come together in the form of a flood, the two factors are multiplied to equal the scale of the disaster. Many policy-makers have acted on the connection that is made between development and disaster."

"The brilliance of At Risk is that it looks at the long term – the things which need to be done to create long-term sustainable solutions to disaster. This book is one of the exceptional introductions to the issues that surround the question of how to deal with disasters. It looks at the human and societal factors of individual and collective decisions – the critical processes which set the course for how we deal with disasters. It emphasises that these fundamental processes occur over a long period of time, creating vulnerability and affecting a hazard when it happens (which might only last seconds). Get the weekly Five Books newsletter The authors show how the perception that disasters are only one-off isolated incidents is simply not true. They say that over decades, sometimes centuries, city planning, building homes, the way people live and especially are forced to live, can create the vulnerability – making an earthquake, which might last only 60 seconds, into a disaster. Hurricane Katrina is an excellent example. The hurricane itself happens over a couple of days, then the flooding creates a crisis which lasts for days, weeks, months and for some people is still ongoing. You have to look at the long-term processes here: why New Orleans was located where it is, why the structural mechanisms were relied on and failed, why the city, state and federal authorities could not deal with the disaster. This example is really interesting as well at a foreign policy level. More than 150 countries around the world offered assistance to the USA, including countries which are considered enemy states, such as Iran, Venezuela and Cuba. These offers weren’t even acknowledged during the first days and then, even when they were acknowledged, all assistance wasn’t taken. Two points come out of this. Number one was that the White House clearly wasn’t prepared for a domestic disaster which overwhelmed the US’s own resources. Number two, they were not prepared to take international assistance. We can compare that to the earthquake which happened in Iran on 26 December 2003. The US offered assistance to Iran and Iran accepted. At the time, there was a lot of hope that Tehran and Washington would be reconciled. But when we take the At Risk framework and apply it, looking at the long-term processes, we see that the White House, particularly under Colin Powell, had been moving towards some sort of low-level but cautious engagement with Tehran beforehand. When the US tried to make the earthquake aid more political, Iran refused and the reconciliation cooled."