Disaster preparationEarthquakes or tiger attacks: understanding what people fear most can help prevent disasters

By Hanna Ruszczyk.

Published 23 May 2019

Understanding what people worry about is crucial to preparing for natural hazards such as earthquakes and mitigating their effects. To prevent disasters, local people, municipal authorities and national governments all need to pull in the same direction – especially when budgets are low for disaster planning. But if residents feel that their everyday fears are ignored by those in power, they may disengage, leaving authorities unable to influence their behavior in a time of crisis.

It’s been more than four years since a magnitude 7.8 earthquake devastated Nepalese cities, claiming thousands of lives. Since then, there have been thousands of aftershocks. Yet when I spoke with residents of Bharatpur – Nepal’s fourth largest city – as part of my ongoing research, beginning in 2014, I was surprised to discover they were more concerned about wild animal attacks than the prospect of another high-magnitude quake.

Understanding what people worry about is crucial to preparing for natural hazards such as earthquakes and mitigating their effects. To prevent disasters, local people, municipal authorities and national governments all need to pull in the same direction – especially when budgets are low for disaster planning. But if residents feel that their everyday fears are ignored by those in power, they may disengage, leaving authorities unable to influence their behavior in a time of crisis.

Throughout my research into the way cities are governed, I have investigated what people worry about, how they cope, how they raise their concerns and what role local authorities play in addressing them. I have consistently found that people tend not to worry about things they cannot prevent or control. And so far, local and national governments haven’t done a good job of recognizing this.

A world of worries
Residents of Bharatpur (which has a population of 300,000) did not worry about earthquakes. The fact is, their everyday experiences and relationships are difficult and filled with tension – so they’re more concerned with immediate dangers and changes than with the indistinct threat of a natural hazard.

For example, the residents I spoke to were worried about wild animals – specifically tigers and rhinos – attacking people in the forest as they gathered firewood for their homes. This is a real threat: when I visited Bharatpur in 2017, I discovered that earlier in the year there had been a deadly tiger attack in broad daylight on the same dirt road where I had interviewed participants for my PhD research in 2014/15.