Editorial

Citation

Wilson, H.C. (2007), "Editorial", Disaster Prevention and Management, Vol. 16 No. 4. https://doi.org/10.1108/dpm.2007.07316daa.001

Editorial

It is no mere chance of fate that this journal is named “Disaster Prevention and Management”. When Alf Keller and I formulated the journal we were quite specific about the title – and we agreed that the most important of these words was “Prevention”.

Within this field there is a terrible temptation to regard “Management” as the key operative word for various reasons such as, funding is easier to obtain when that magic word appears in the title of a grant application, there is a plethora of solid research into the topic, there are boundless examples to draw information from for further research and one can obtain concrete results from the topic. Unfortunately, the same cannot be said about “Prevention” which by its very essence is an ethereal subject. It is practically impossible to quantify the benefits to mankind from preventative measures, politicians and paymasters cannot get to grips with a topic which has no hard numbers or lacks a quantification system that can supply such numbers, and from a public point-of-view prevention tends to means restrictions on their lifestyle with no measurable results. If a disaster is prevented how can you measure the extent of that prevention?

A couple of decades ago scientists demonstrated that the ozone layer that protects the earth was being thinned by the release of CFC type materials into the earth’s atmosphere and warned of the negative effects that the continuance of such behaviour would have on the health of mankind. The outcome was worldwide legislation that, apparently, adjusted the situation and the thinning has stopped, or may even be in the process of being reversed. How many lives have been saved? It is not possible to quantify.

A recent report from Christian Aid (2007) makes frightening reading. According to the report 163 million people worldwide have been forced to leave their homes or countries for various reasons such as conflict, drought, persecution etc., but the report estimates that by 2050 this number will rise to 1 billion due to climatic change phenomena such as floods and drought, and also by conflict, natural disasters, development projects such as dams built to alleviate the effects of global climatic change. Low level areas such as Bangladesh, the Nile Delta, China and Europe and numerous small islands will be threatened by rising sea levels, whereas, other countries such as India, parts of China, Ghana, and Egypt will suffer increasing drought conditions with associated crop failures which will force inhabitants to leave these areas.

At the same time a commissioned report on Global Warming from eminent scientists has been apparently watered-down to make it more acceptable to several governments who need the recommendations contained in the original report to be more “manageable” which is something that did not occur when the topic was the immediate reduction on the release of CFCs into the atmosphere.

The argument over whether or not human activity is having an effect on the carbon dioxide level in the atmosphere and, whether or not increasing levels of carbon dioxide have an effect on the temperature of the planet has surely been won, or at least nearly totally won.

If the outcomes contained in the report from Christian Aid come to fruition then what we have learned from previous disaster management will be virtually meaningless as we have never experienced such a calamity within living memory. We have no relevant information that we can draw upon to give us any guidelines on how to prepare for such a large-scale migration of people over a long time-scale.

Hence, disaster management will need a completely new set of rules and guidelines in which international cooperation will be paramount, but will that cooperation be forthcoming? The countries of the world have never before been exposed to such a calamity and it must be terrifying governments worldwide, or perhaps they will just stick their heads ever deeper into the sand.

So, we can either use the next 30-40 years to prepare to “manage” the situation, or we can use those years to “prevent” the disaster from occurring.

The choice is ours to make.

H.C. Wilson