Environment Disaster Linkages: Volume 9

Environment disaster linkages become more prominent where people are more dependent on natural resources. In several cases, environment becomes a cause, and disaster becomes the impact. Climate change impacts in terms of typhoon and catastrophic flooding are usual examples. On the other hand, in some cases, disaster becomes the cause, and environmental problems become the impacts. Disaster debris is a classic example of this, where the debris issues can be treated as an environmental problem, which is caused by a disaster.

Environment and disasters have a close relationship. Environmental change causes disasters or enhances the frequency or intensity of disasters. Climate change is often regarded as an environmental phenomenon; however, when we see changes in the typhoon path, or repeated occurrences of heavy rainfall or strong typhoons, it is often attributed to climatic changes. In that case, environmental change (climate change) is the cause and disaster (typhoon or flood) is considered as the impact. On the other hand, when a disaster like typhoon, earthquake, or tsunami occurs, it produces a huge amount of debris. Disaster debris or disaster waste becomes an environmental problem. In many cases, the disaster also causes significant impacts on the ecology. Therefore, disaster becomes a cause, and environmental degradation becomes the impact.

Water is the source of life and civilization. However, the world is facing water crises – imminent and worse crises that demand immediate and concerted actions. Even today, around the world, nearly 1.1 billion people are living without access to safe drinking water (Shaw & Thaitakoo, 2010). This has adverse impacts on their health and livelihoods. Approximately 2.6 billion people live without access to basic sanitation. This is a threat to their dignity as well as health. Water pollution is getting worse in many places across the world. Moreover, water-related disasters are widespread. These are serious natural disasters that cause catastrophic damage to human lives. Water problems are fundamental causes of endemic diseases, hunger, gender inequality, lack of education and jobs, endangered ecosystems, and other socioeconomic and environmental problems across the world. Most of the Millennium Development Goals cannot be achieved without solving water problems (Hashimoto, 2006).

Human beings spend their daily lives within the range of the atmospheric boundary layer, where airflow is affected by friction from Earth's surface. The airflow in this area is generally called wind. Strong wind occasionally causes severe damage to infrastructures and people because of its aerodynamic effects, but even weak and moderate winds can have serious environmental impacts on human society such as those seen with air-pollution problems and thermal effects.

Among natural disasters, drought affected the most people worldwide during the past few decades (Obasi, 1994). Since the late 1970s, there has been a shift in El Niño-Southern Oscillation toward more warm events, closely related to a worldwide trend for intensified drought (Dai, Trenberth, & Karl, 1998). In particular, this trend was manifested as widespread droughts during 1999–2002 in the northern hemisphere (Lotsch, Friedl, Anderson, & Tucker, 2005), including Asia, and notably in Mongolia (Nandintsetseg, Shinoda, Kimura, & Ibaraki, 2010; Shinoda, Ito, Nachinshonhor, & Erdenetsetseg, 2007). The decade of 2000s has experienced increased vegetation degradation and wind erosion that resulted from decreased summer precipitation in wide areas of East Asia (Kurosaki, Shinoda, & Mikami, 2011a; Kurosaki, Shinoda, Mikami, & Nandintsetseg, 2011b). Furthermore, in general, projections of climate models have suggested that the frequency and intensity of extreme weathers will likely increase in the future (IPCC WG I, 2007). Given this background, it is vital to make an assessment of socioeconomic impacts of the extreme weathers and to develop proactive approaches to mitigating such impacts.

Floods in Vietnam have been a well-known phenomenon and occur in all regions of the country, especially in the Central Coast region, Mekong Delta, and Red River Delta (Socialist Republic of Vietnam, 2007). People had to learn to live with floods, particularly those whose livelihood depends on the productive functions of annual flooding. Floods are embedded in Vietnamese culture, as ancestors of the Vietnamese nation regarded flooding as one of the four biggest dangers to people, along with fires, robbers, and invaders (Tran, Marincioni, Shaw, Sarti, & An, 2008).

Coastal zones throughout the world have historically been among the most heavily exploited areas because of their rich resources. In coastal countries today more than half of the population lives in coastal areas, and migration from inland areas to the coast is increasing. Climate change has posed new threats to many of the coastal areas with rises in sea-level and the increasing intensity and frequency of coastal hazards. In many countries, coastal areas are narrow strips, located between mountain and sea areas, which are becoming overcrowded, and therefore increasingly vulnerable. Also, hazards caused by climate change are showing an increasing trend, and therefore the cumulative risk in the coastal areas is getting higher.

Urban areas are particularly vulnerable to climate impacts. Extreme weather events have long been causes of disasters independent of climate change, leading to destruction of infrastructure, loss of lives, and loss of assets. However, the changes and increases in impacts brought about by climate change will further stress physical built infrastructure such as transportation, communication, and water delivery systems, increase pressure on energy resources, and affect economic sectors such as fisheries and tourism. Impacts may be exacerbated by inadequate infrastructure and housing, limited access to services, limited urban planning and land-use management, and limited preparedness of city dwellers and emergency services. Urban poor are especially at risk due to their settlements in areas vulnerable to floods and landslides, limited access to services such as water, energy supply, and health, and few assets or safety nets that enable them to manage loss. Rapid urbanization and population increase places additional stress on urban infrastructure and ecological systems and on the ability of cities to manage climate-change impacts.

Human beings are inseparable from the environment because of their dependence on ecosystems and their services (Schroter, 2009). The Millennium Ecosystem Assessment (2005) identifies ecosystem services as vital links between humans and ecosystems because these services are essential for human well-being, especially in terms of security, basic materials for a good life, health, good social relations, and freedom of choice and action. Ecosystem services include flows of materials, energy, and information from natural resources that combined with manufactured and human resources contribute to human well-being (Costanza et al., 1997). These include provisioning services (e.g., food, fresh water, wood and fiber, fuel), regulating services (e.g., climate, flood and disease regulation, water purification), supporting services (e.g., nutrient cycling, soil formation, primary production), and cultural services (e.g., aesthetic, spiritual, educational, and recreational value). The regulating services provided by ecosystems, in particular, are critical for disaster risk reduction and climate change adaptation. Ecosystems primarily affect both the probability and the severity of events and modulate the effects of extreme events. For example, soils store large amounts of water, facilitate transfer of surface water to groundwater, and prevent or reduce flooding, and natural buffers reduce hazards by absorbing runoff peaks and storm surges.

Over the centuries cities have undergone various types of urbanizations, thereby changing the lives of the urban residents. At the same time our earth has undergone a damaging transition called climate change that is threatening the lives of millions of people across the globe. The threat is even more in cities and their adjoining regions, as they have higher concentrations of people, including the most vulnerable urban poor. Moreover, the cities and their administration are either oblivious to the emergence of such threats or have taken inadequate measures to counter the effects of the change. Besides, the focus has been predominantly on urban areas rather than urban systems.

The southwest coastal region is part of an inactive delta of large Himalayan rivers and is protected from tidal surge by the Sundarbans mangrove forest. This area is the hub of all types of disasters such as cyclones, tidal surges, floods, drought, salinity intrusions, repeated waterlogging, and land subsidence. Cyclonic tidal surges and floods are the more common disasters, and their effects are frequently experienced at the local level. But silent and invisible disasters such as increased salinity, arsenic contamination, and drought affect local livelihoods, people, and environments in this region. The vulnerability of southwest region to increased salinity, arsenic contamination, and drought are the result of a complex interrelationship among biophysical, social, economical, and technological characteristics of the country. Moreover, in the current and foreseeable future, the country is likely to be affected by the biggest, most long-lasting, and global scale but silent disaster: increased salinity, natural arsenic contamination, and drought. Therefore, this region is thought to be the most disaster-prone region in Bangladesh because of natural disasters and highly vulnerable to the effects of climate change.

All disasters produce wastes of some kind, be it the trees fallen by a cyclone, a house destroyed by an earthquake, a beach coated by an oil spill, or animals killed by a flood. Postdisaster responses also produce wastes – from the human excreta of people staying in the camp to day-to-day household wastes. The issue of management of wastes created by disasters is becoming an increasingly important issue to be addressed in postdisaster response due to their scale, complexity, and cost. The cost of disaster waste management (DWM) has crossed the billion dollar mark in some of the major disasters, which is necessitating and prompting the emergence of a separate stream of expertise in DWM. In January 2011, the Joint Unit of the United Nations Environment Programme and Office for Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) came out with Disaster Waste Management Guidelines (2011).

In this chapter, the linkages between environment- and disaster-related issues are reviewed in the context of urban planning in developing countries. The focus is on urban areas, with the aim to understand processes in urban systems that are distinct from those in rural villages/towns. Over the past few decades, more people have started living in cities in comparison to rural areas. This shift has led to an increase in the global urban population, which became larger than the rural population in 2007 (United Nations Habitat [UNHABITAT], 2008). The majority of this urban growth has taken place in cities located in developing countries, predominantly in the Asian and African region (UNHABITAT, 2008). Furthermore, it is estimated that up to 95 percent of the total global population increase will be in cities (UNDESA, 2010). Mainly cities in low- and mid-income countries are experiencing trends of urbanization (UNHABITAT, 2008). Projections suggest that 8 out of total 29 new megacities by 2025 will be in developing countries (UNDESA, 2010); therefore, the vast amount of growth will take place in many small and medium cities (UNDESA, 2010; United Nations International Strategy for Disaster Reduction [UNISDR], 2009).

Among the most fragile, complex, and productive ecosystems to benefit humans are coastal ecosystems, and they offer many services. These ecosystem services range from provisioning services to protection services, cultural services, and supporting services. The coastal zone is defined as a transition between the land and the sea, making it clear that there would be dynamic activities both complementing and sometimes conflicting with each other. Coastal resources constitute an important component of natural resources, particularly in a country such as India.

In 2004, the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) in Bangkok, Thailand, and UN-HABITAT collaborated on an eco-housing project in the Asian region (UNEP, 2010). The aim was to promote eco-housing as a key disaster preventive measure in the Asia-Pacific region. Eco-housing is an evolving concept that applies sustainability principles into the entire lifecycle of a housing project: from design, through construction and maintenance to the “end of life” activities. The concept applies environmentally friendly and sustainable approaches to the design, site assessment, material selection, energy management, water management, and waste management to the household and community level. The project addressed four key areas: (1) knowledge building, (2) educational initiative, (3) networking, and (4) implementation. The eco-housing project involved countries such as Australia, China, India, Indonesia, Thailand, and Sri Lanka. It was implemented in the 2004 tsunami-affected areas in Banda Aceh and Calang, Indonesia. As part of the tsunami recovery projects, an “eco-village” was established in Lagoswatta, located in the Kalutara district near Colombo in Sri Lanka. It was supported by Sarvodaya, one of the local NGOs. UNEP and UN-HABITAT initiated the eco-housing project in 2004 to build capacity and to increase awareness on this issue. A Regional Expert Group on eco-housing was established to provide technical input and train national architects on this concept. This study was focused on the eco-village project in disaster recovery from the Indian Ocean Tsunami in 2004. In particular, it focused on the case study in Sri Lanka: “The project has implemented passive cooling techniques, solar panels on houses, segregation of waste, composting of bio-degradable waste, recycling of inorganic waste, sub-terra system for recycling waste water, and roof top water harvesting. Site layout and landscaping has been done to minimize disturbances to site, provide shading and improve indoor ventilation” (UNEP, 2010).

According to the most recent report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change [IPCC], 2007), 11 out of the last 12 years have been the hottest on record since 1850. It is also estimated that the average global surface temperature from 1850–1899 to 2001–2005 has increased by 0.76°C. Global sea level increased at an average rate of 1.8mm per year over the period 1961–2003 and, over the 20th century, sea levels rose by 0.17m. Since the middle of 20th century, human activities have contributed to global warming, a phenomenon that is expected to continue at an increasingly faster rate in the 21st century if there is no effort to address it.

Asia is considered one of the fastest developing continents. As per the UNDP Human Development Report (2010), Asian countries like China, Nepal, Indonesia, Lao PDR, and South Korea are among the top 10 fastest growing countries. China, the second highest achiever in the world in terms of HDI improvement since 1970, is the only country on the “Top 10 Movers” list due to income rather than health or education achievements. Significant progress in human development was also found for most of the nine South Asian countries in the trends analysis – Afghanistan, Bangladesh, India, Iran, Nepal, and Pakistan. Inequality for women remains a major barrier to human development throughout Asia, the 2010 Report shows. The new Gender Inequality Index – which captures gender gaps in reproductive health, empowerment, and workforce participation in 138 countries – shows that six countries of East Asia and the Pacific fall in the lower half on gender inequality, with Papua New Guinea among the bottom 10. Asian Development Bank (ADB)'s Asian Development Outlook (2011) forecasts regional GDP growth of 7.8% in 2011 and 7.7% the following year. The projected growth rates are lower than the 9% posted in 2010 but show that the region continues its firm recovery from the global economic crisis. It needs to be kept in mind that Asia's diversity is based on socioeconomic, demographic, climatic, and cultural characteristics.

Fig. 1 illustrates the current level of the integration of three sectors, and Table 1 shows the strategic entry points for the integration.