In the recent days, the global environment is being affected greatly by human activities. Its impact has already been observed in many parts of the world. A number of environmental hazards have been witnessed in the last decade, and they continue to amaze scientists and environmentalists to date with the frequency with which they have been occurring.
The purpose of this article is to examine how people and societies are reacting to the increased global disasters taking place these days.
Types Of Hazards
An event is labeled a hazard if it impacts a large number of people in the specific region and disrupts their normal lifestyle. Floods, earthquakes, severe thunderstorms, pesticide contamination, and toxic or oil spills are some common events that are termed hazardous. Hazards can be caused due to the action of nature, biological agents, social disruptions, technological hazards and chronic hazards.
Geography of a region has shown to have some effect on the type of hazards occurring in that region.
Human Vulnerability To Hazards
The present demographics show that people residing in many regions of the world are more vulnerable to hazards than ever before. A report released by United Nations Organization shows that the number of disasters have increased steadily over the last 30 years.
Research has shown that the vulnerability to disasters has increased in the recent years mainly due to human unreadines. Most disasters are specific to an area and studies have shown that people who live in these areas are unprepared to face these disasters even after knowing that they might occur anytime soon.
In areas where loss of life is high, the lack of effective warning systems and reliable evacuation plans is the main culprit. While proper warning systems have been installed in some countries, many still lack the basic infrastructure to predict and deal with environmental hazards.
The impact of these disasters is greater in less-developed countries where increasing urbanization and environmental degradation enhance environmental changes.
Human Response To Hazards
Factors like jobs and better living conditions often force people to leave their homes and move to another place. With more and more people moving to the same locations for livelihood or other opportunities, some places support greater population than the others.
As a result of this, the environment of areas with high population experiences a greater change. When this change leads to disasters or hazards, the government and the people are not equipped to deal with them and find it hard to recover from the impact.
The best response to disaster would be to re-establish the primary lifelines and then deal with the other lesser important issues later. This will enable us to stabilize the situation and prevent epidemics from striking.
To study the effect of human activities and global environmental changes on human health, read
Environmental change and health: How human activity induces changes that trigger health hazards
