Extreme Weather and Disasters

If the characterizations of extreme weather hazards and their impacts that still persist in news reporting were to be accepted, the connections between disasters and justice might seem tenuous. But decades of critical research and advocacy demonstrate precisely the opposite. To observe how the impacts of extreme hydrometeorological events such as floods, cyclones, heatwaves and drought play out for the populations exposed to them is to challenge all too common stereotypes about the causation and effects of disasters. Understanding of the socially driven dimensions of disasters, as humanitarian crises, has penetrated into international discourse to such an extent that it is now inscribed in the UN’s Sendai Framework for Disaster Risk Reduction. Yet, we can still hear reference to disasters being caused by ‘acts of God’, to human impotence in the face of ‘Nature’s Fury’, or to hazards being great levellers that do not discriminate in their impacts. Such characterizations fundamentally miss the social and environmental injustices that imbue the causation and development of disasters and the responses that society makes to them. They also obscure the deep historically shaped legacies of colonialism and ongoing dynamics of coloniality which continue to mediate the approaches taken by powerful states in relation to disasters.