Individual and Societal Responses to Natural Hazards

In spite of a vast and growing body of literature devoted to the ‘wise’ and ‘rational’ development, use and management of lands subject to floods, fires, droughts, erosion, landslides, hurricanes, typhoons and earthquakes, we continue to observe the opposite. People continue to build and live on lands subject to natural hazards. People develop and live on floodplains along rivers. They construct and occupy homes on coastal lands bordering seas and oceans, in forests, and on the tops of unstable cliffs. They live on geologic faults in regions subject to earthquakes. People do these things even at the risk of their property being flooded, burned, eroded or damaged, if not totally destroyed in other ways. Observe, for example, the strong desire expressed by many, who lived in New Orleans, to restore and rebuild their homes and property, even though they know they can suddenly lose everything from just one big storm. Development in hazardous regions continues. Damages caused by natural hazards continue to increase, despite increased investments in hazard protection and mitigation Cutter and Emrich 2005; Downton et al. 2005; Pielke et al. 2002 . Why? Is it people’s lack of understanding, or their lack of even wanting to consider the actual risks and their consequences? Why are we less afraid of dying from a catastrophic flood than from brain cancer, where the risk of getting cancer is much less than that of being drowned? Why do we spend more to prepare for a less likely hazard when the outcome can be equally fatal? Given the deaths, the social costs and major property damage resulting from last year’s hurricanes Katrina and Rita and the recent floods in the northeast, let’s focus, for the moment, on floodplain development. When substantial storm damage occurs, as it appears to be doing with increasing frequency and intensity, commissions and blue-ribbon committees of one kind or another are created and charged with finding out why, and making recommendations as to how to avoid such losses in the future. Their reports and congressional testimonies, inevitably suggesting restrictions on the development of lands subject to floods and more investments in flood protection, are added to those of previous commissions and organizations, including those of Gilbert White and his colleagues in the mid 1950s, the more recent Galloway’s Interagency Floodplain Management Review Committee in the mid 1990s IFMRC 1994; Galloway 2005a , and others prompted by Katrina and Rita e.g., Carter 2005; Landers, J. 2005 . Each