Natural Hazards

What is the difference between natural hazards and natural disasters?

Natural Hazards: A naturally-occurring event that could harm us directly or indirectly.

Natural disaster: a natural disaster is the negative impact following an actual occurrence of natural hazard in the event that it significantly harms a community

Which type of natural hazards are most common around the globe?

Floods and extreme weather

Can you explain at least two reasons why the annual number of recorded natural disasters has increased since 1900?

Climate change/global warming

Human activity

Deaths from natural hazards have decreased in recent decades. True or false?

true

Risk = Hazard x Vulnerability

Hazard: natural processes capable of causing death and/or destruction

Vulnerability: social or economic sensitivity to the effects hazards

What are some factors that affect how vulnerable a person or population may be to natural hazards?

• Proximity to a possible hazardous event 

• Population Density in the area proximal to the event

• Scientific understanding of the hazard 

• Public education and awareness  of the hazard

• Existence/non-existence of early-warning systems and lines of communication.

• Availability and readiness of emergency infrastructure

• Construction styles and building codes

• In general, less developed countries are more vulnerable due to lack of understanding, infrastructure, building codes, etc.

• Poverty - leads to poor building structure, increased population density, and lack of communication and infrastructure.

Define hydro-meteorological and geological hazards and give an example of each.

Hydrometeorological: floods, storm surges, windstorms, wildfires, heat waves, snow and dust storms

Geological: earthquakes, tsunamis, volcanic, landslides, avalanches

What are some pre-event and post-event actions that can be taken to mitigate the impacts of natural hazards?

Pre-event (anticipatory)

Land-use planning, Insurance, Evacuation, Artificial control of natural processes

Post-event (reactive)

Homeless shelters, Emergency food, water and medical services, search/rescue efforts, Firefighting

• How does plate tectonics relate to natural hazards?

Natural disasters like earthquakes or volcanoes which cause natural hazards, these disasters are related to tectonic plates

Can you describe the three types of plate boundaries and identify the geologic hazards associated with each?

• Transform: plates slide past each other, earthquakes

• Convergent: volcanoes

• Divergent: rifts in oceans

• Can you describe at least three earthquake-related hazards?

• Ground shaking

• Landslides

• Liquefaction

• Surface rupture

• Can you describe at least three ways that climate change affects natural hazards?

• altering the frequency and intensity of hazard event

•  affecting vulnerability to hazards, and

•  changing exposure patterns

What is attribution science and what methods does it use?

• the study of how human activities may have contributed to extreme weather events

• statistical methods and computer models