Earth: A Fragile System Notes

-disaster: substantial event causing physical damage, injury or loss of life, and/or a drastic change to the environment (environmental loss)
natural disasters are preventable with proper mitigation
- technological, political, and social advances make this easier
- increasing human population and climate change make this harder

globally, natural disasters are increasing in terms of
- death (fatalities)
- destruction (economic losses)
generally, there are high fatalities in developing countries and high costs in developed countries

many hazards are not increasing in frequency or severity (earthquakes, volcanoes, etc.)
- population growth has put more people and more structures in hazardous settings because they’re more vulnerable
there is evidence that weather/climate-related hazards are getting more severe and occurring more frequently

present:
- with warning of disasters, people can be evacuated
- infrastructure destroyed by natural disasters
future:
- with greater population, infrastructure becomes even more sensitive/important
- people are less likely to be evacuated successfully
- death tolls are likely to increase

vulnerability: the severity of problems that a community (people, property, infrastructure, resources, environment) will suffer if exposed to a particular natural hazard

disaster scale: a logarithmic scale that uses common, standardized terms and measurements
- key to communicating disaster information
- increases by powers of 10
- each order of magnitude = 1 power of 10
”order of magnitude”= powers of 10
- 10^0=1
- 10^1=10
- 10^2=100
- “magnitude 3” means 10^3 or 1000x higher/stronger/bigger than magnitude 0
disasters happen at many magnitudes
- higher magnitude events occur less and lower magnitude events occur more