Disasters: Myth or the Reality?

I enrolled a MOOC titled "Disasters and Ecosystems: Resilience in a Changing Climate" which is organised by the UNEP (and other organisations... which names I'm going to learn by heart cause they have like 2 minutes of credits after each lecture O_o ). Not that I know nothing about disasters, risks or climate change (I'm a geographer and ecologist after all), but I was curious about the product that was made by organisation of this class.

The third video (and first video that is not an introduction) they teach us about the disasters; differences between hazard and disaster; and risks. Well... the thing they told, the graphs they showed - that what inspired the title of this post.

Terminology

Here see some definitions they use.

Disaster. When they say "disaster" they mean "natural disaster" that was enhanced by human [mismanagement].

Risk - a potential losses due to disasters.

Hazard - A dangerous phenomenon, substance, human activity or condition that may cause loss of life, injury or other health impacts, property damage, loss of livelihoods and services, social and economic disruption, or environmental damage.

Exposure - People, property, systems, or other elements present in hazard zones that are thereby subject to potential losses.

Vulnerability - the characteristics and circumstances of a community, system or asset that make it susceptible to the damaging effects of a hazard

Fails

The risk

They presented a "great" formula for (a disaster) risk evaluation that they use in the UN:

Risk = Hazard * Exposure * Vulnerability

where: Exposure = People * ExposureTime

Vulnarability - succeptability to hazard.

Well these characteristics do correspond to the risk, but the formula is stupid! I already wrote about that: Risk = Probability * Damage. And this formula actually corresponds to the definition they give (see Terminology section). We can't get a monetary outcome from their formula. We can't get numeric numeric output out of that formula at all: can you multiply flood by people? Can you???!!!

A Disaster with Disasters

The fail with the risk evaluation is a common mistake, but the fail with disaster - that is what really cool!

Take a look at this plot (which is from reading materials from the course):

What can you conclude from this plot? That the world is doing to hell and we all will fall to disaster? Let's look closer. The exposure is growing faster for poorer countries (and it is the only conclusion they make in lecture)... but the total number of people exposed (and for each type of countries) seems to be the almost unchanged! Interesting... This means (see the definition for the exposure) that there are just a 150% increase of property value in the dangerous area of the poorer countries (and 25% for the richest) on a span of 30 years. Does this graph shows us only the economic grows? I think it does... (reminds me of my previous post).

Now to the most delicious part. Take a look at this two graphs from the lecture readings:

Deaths dynamics

Damage dynamics

This is interesting. Despite the population growth and all that questionable "climate change" staff people die less (in total numbers), see fig. 1, but the damage increases, see fig. 2. Did they take inflation into account for the damage graph? Do not know... I think they didn't, otherwise they would use "discounted damage" term instead of just "damage" and would indicate the base year. So the second graph seems to demonstrate inflation and may be the economic grows.

Clearly disasters are not that disastrous. Despite the new on the TV on the subject the nature's wrath even enhanced by human is less and less dangerous for human lives. The pockets are to suffer: the storm in port wrecking the humble fisherman's boat or a trawler - that's the difference.

Conclusion

From these graphs I can conclude one thing - it is safer to live now than in the past, a disaster should not be feared as a deadly havoc. To my mind the disaster nowadays is entirely economic issue. See, if we loose less people and (maybe) more money - we should just develop more advanced insurance techniques to cover economic damage and relax. The disasters should just be studied as phenomena to develop cheap early warning systems, let the property be destroyed (just cover the losses with insurance) and additional employment to be created (rebuilding).

This is my conclusion form the graphs I showed here: disasters are an ancient myth! Just buy insurance! LOL

About Environmental Risk Assessment

There was a scientific seminar dedicated to environmental risks assessment in the scientific-research centre where I work. A speaker was awfully ignorant in subject unfortunately. As a person who is experienced in environmental risk assessment (see my posts about risks and a particular methodology) I was afraid that I will be the one to ask the speaker (quite an old man) some inconvenient question about formulas he used, but luckily he was ashamed by someone else.

During the discussion the question of monetary aspect of the risk and damage to environment was raised: whether it is possible to use money as the measure of risks that only applicable to environment itself. In other words: is it rational to use money when assessing possible damage to solely ecosystem (there are no money in ecosystem by itself), and how to perform such assessment?

What do YOU think? I wasn't able to find an appropriate answer at that moment, but now I believe I have a point. My answer is YES, we can use money to assess risks and damage dealt to ecosystem only.

Firstly the assessment is made by humans and for humans. And humans understand monetised value more easily. The approach that I want to propose is about assessment of money that have to be spent to recover ecosystem to exact the same state it was prior to caused or possible damage. Just imagine how much money one have to spent for recreating and reintroduction of just one extinguished species (a tasmanian wolf for example). Here you are a monetised damage to environment.

Another approach I have in mind is about evaluation of risks via relative live value of species (which can be easily monetised too). Lets use this formula for evaluation of life of individual of a given species: V=(1/N)*P, where V - relative value, N - population of the given species (or given areal of species), P - total population of the human beings. We will have a relative value as 1 for humans and 1*(P/N) for a given species. For example for a tiger we will have its relative individual value about 1 076 900! Literally, if we have a choice whether to save 1 million people or a single tiger, the tiger must be saved - not a million of people!!!

And we can monetise this value by multiplication on the average value of the single human life (you can play a bit with numbers given here).

So the damage to ecosystem may be assessed via loss of number of individuals of species that live in a given ecosystem and we are able to easily evaluate a relative value of the individuals of the each species, and it can be easyly monetised.

Methodology for Assessment of Environmental Risk Caused by Fires at Illegal Dumps

It's actually already two month old news, but my research "Developement of the Universal Methodology for Assessement of Environmental Risk Caused by Fires at Illegal Dumps" (download in RUSSIAN), that was made special for Fire Monitoring Challenge (by GIS-Lab, Microsoft, NEXTGIS, several universities and GIS/spatial data corporations), was  awarded the 2-nd pace. The prize consisted of the fancy diploma, Lenovo IdeaPad G560 (thanks to all the gods it became much less uglier when I've installed openSUSE at it and applied an OSM sticker ;-), a wireless mouse (my wife was happy to grab it) and a nice book on remote sensing for children.

Instead of abstract:
Developed methodology for assessment of the fire probability in dependence of spatial location and actual area of illegal dump. It is applicable for any part of the world. Software used: QGIS, R.

Spatial component of the probability of the fire at illegal dump in Leningrad region, Russia

I was lucky to present this research at two conferences and today I've received a printed "minor" publication of the article (it is beta-version of the paper available at the link above). So it is possible now to cite it as:

Yury V. Ryabov (2011) Razrabotka univercal'noy metodiki rascheta veroyatnosti vozniknovenia pozhara na nesankcionirovennoy svalke // Sbornik nauchnih trudov molodyh specialistov, prepodavateley i aspirantov po resultatam provedenia Tret'ego molodezрnogo ecologichescogo congressa "Severnaya palmira", 21-22 noyabria 2011, Sankt-Peterburg. - SPb NICEB RAN - pp. 93-106.

To Do: develope formula for composition coefficient calculation; translation to English; major publication.

P.S. If you are interested in this research and do not speak Russian don't hesitate to contact me and ask for general translation.

About Risks

I'm looking for the approaches for the environmental risks estimation at the given area. I have my own ideas for the current task, but it is always interesting to know what other people do.

Today I acquainted myself with a master thesis on a subject of spatial analysis of epidemiology of some disease. I was curious because it was about risk mapping. But I was totally disappointed. The guy didn't mention the definition for the "risk" term he used and it is quite obvious why. Instead of the risk assessment (which implies monetary estimation of the probability of undesired event) he estimated the probability of contracting disease... The thesis is good actually, but the guy did much lesser job than one should when he studies risks.

The same shit exists in Russian legislation. It defines "environmental risk" only as s probability of event that harms environment. So for example if I'm studying risks of the fire at illegal dumps then I can assess just a probability of such events at the given region and don't bother myself with possible damage estimation...

Remember: [Risk] = [Probability] * [Damage]. If you do not estimate damage - you are calculating something else, so name it accordingly.