Disaster policy and climate change: How much more of the same?

Over recent decades, research and policy have steadily moved from viewing natural disasters as just that - ‘natural’, imposed on humans by outside forces - to understanding disasters as phenomena more often caused by the vulnerability of societies, settlements, and assets that are constructed or shaped by human decisions. Disasters are increasingly understood as something we have a strong degree of control over, through active policy choices or a failure to make choices. There has also been increasing understanding of the nature of disasters and of human vulnerability to them through strengthened research efforts and through better documentation of events and experiences: vulnerability to disasters, and thus disaster risk, grows with the size and spread of human settlements, and the value and exposure of built and other assets. More recently the prospect of climate change, and specifically an increased frequency and intensity of severe climatic events, has accelerated reconsideration of disasters and how society should or could deal with them. This chapter examines ways in which disasters have been understood and responded to over time, from a policy and institutional perspective. The central question raised in the chapter is the degree to which current policy approaches and institutional capacities are sufficient for the future. Is a further incremental evolution of policy, such as has occurred over recent decades, enough? How much will the future be more of the same? The chapter extracts major themes from the disaster literature (e.g., Handmer and Dovers, 2013) and brings these into a closer consideration of the interplay between ‘traditional’ disaster thinking and a future where climate change is proposed to have a significant impact on disasters (e.g., IPCC, 2012).