The Nature of “Natural Disasters”: Survivors’ Explanations of Earthquake Damage

The distinction between natural and human-made disasters is ingrained in everyday language. Disaster scientists have long been critical of this dichotomy. Nonetheless, virtually no attention has been paid to how disaster survivors conceptualize the causes of the disasters they experience. In this mixed-methods longitudinal study, 112 survivors of the 2016-2017 Central Italy earthquakes completed questionnaires 3 and 16 months following the earthquakes, with the aim of assessing attributions of blame for the earthquake damage. In-depth interviews were also conducted with 52 participants at the 3-month mark to explore representations of causation for the earthquake damage. The distinction between disasters caused by nature and disasters caused by humans was not supported by survivors of the earthquake. In the longitudinal surveys, building firms and the State were assigned as much blame as nature for the earthquake damage, at both 3 months and 16 months after the earthquakes. Corroborating this complexity, in the interviews, the causes of the earthquake damage, rather than being understood as purely natural, were perceived as a complex mosaic composed of political, technological, natural, and moral factors. This empirical work shows that disaster survivors combine both nature-based and human-based explanations of disasters, rather than subscribing to one or the other. These findings have practical implications for disaster risk reduction and response.