China, Pakistan floods; Haiti earthquake: not merely "natural" disasters

of superficial structural modernism” in some of its least-developed areas. This includes building schools, hospitals, and housing blocks in places that had little infrastructure before.

“A lot of the policies have been really progressive, for instance, trying to encourage primary and secondary education in formerly isolated areas,” Wisner says. “But the problem was that a lot of the schools were poorly built, and they’re the ones that fell down in the [2008 Sichuan] earthquake.”

Unsound building practices in unsafe areas — such as unstable hillsides or flood-prone riversides — can compound the damage and casualties from events that would have been fairly minor in the past (with regard to Haiti, see “Engineers urge overhaul of Haiti’s archaic, anarchic building practices,” 26 January 2010 HSNW; “Haiti’s lack of building standards major contributor to scope of disaster,” 18 January 2010 HSNW; and “Haitian architects, urban planners say the need is to build a better Haiti,” 28 January 2010 HSNW).

It is not that governments do not understand the problem, Kathleen Tierney, director of the Natural Hazards Center at the University of Colorado, Boulder, told Flintoff.

Tierney, who just returned from a teaching and research stint in China, says Beijing is developing fairly effective mechanisms for dealing with disasters after they occur. “They have a very clear role for the army, and they have the capability to rescue people and provide relief,” she says.

When it comes to preventing losses from disasters, however, Tierney gives the Chinese government lower marks. “Chinese officials understand that they face multiple hazards, but they’re not yet doing a good job to mitigate those hazards,” she says.

Wisner, who has advised the U.S. Federal Emergency Management Agency and the United Nations on disaster-risk reduction, says that ultimately dealing with calamity is a matter of political will. “The expertise exists,” Wisner says. “All this stuff is known. The question one has to ask is why are these mistakes [in development] being made over and over again?”

Wisner says that development decisions are too often controlled by wealthy elites who have no interest in protecting people who have been marginalized by poverty. This is a delicate way of highlighting the three major problems any effort to improve conditions in Pakistan and Haiti faces: the governments of both countries are corrupt, ineffective, and indifferent to the welfare of their people. Large portions of aid and relief money donated by foreign governments and international organizations in the wake of disasters never reach the intended recipients because it is stolen by government ministers and state officials up and down the bureaucracy. When it comes to money aimed to fund infrastructure projects for the future, an even larger portion of it disappears into the country leaders’ private bank accounts.

Even where a government wants to do the right thing, as is the case with China, Wisner says, decisions on development are often made from the top down, without consulting with local people.

Both Wisner and Tierney point out that governments should have a strong interest in mitigating natural hazards. As development surges, so does the human and economic cost of disasters. The experts note that governments have fallen when their people lost faith in their ability to deal with disasters.