50 Natural hazards don’t have to be disasters with Morten Wendelbo
On this week’s episode, host Dan Zehner meets up with political economist and writer Morten Wendelbo. As early as high school, the Denmark native was exposed to international viewpoints that shaped his understanding of the world. Today, he focuses on demographic research in an effort to improve the lives of as many people as possible. He earned his bachelor’s degree in global politics and environmental studies from Washington and Lee University and his master’s in international affairs from Texas A&M University, where presently he is heading into a PhD. Despite being a life-long academic, he is committed to communicating science lay public. In general, Wendelbo is interested in how humans organize themselves to improve themselves. For example: how do we save lives in the face of natural disasters? We start with data. In disaster studies, people typically quantify the severity of an event by its physical strength: magnitude, wind speed, inches of rain. But those measurements don’t tell us how the event affected people. Those measures tend to be deaths, injuries, economic damage. But those measurements are still incomplete, he says. It’s more complicated than, say, comparing Hurricane Katrina versus Maria. On the face of it, Katrina was a larger disaster, but Wendelbo says we need to measure consequences of disaster on variables such as consumption loss, where what you lose depends on social and educational status. And we have to measure affects that were indirectly caused by the natural hazard, such as anxiety. He says we can aggregate such data, but, since indirect consequences can occur months and years later, it is an enormous effort, and furthermore, not terribly useful. Predicting disasters, not hazards Instead, Wendelbo says, there are ways we can discover in advance where the physical vulnerabilities are and to what degree they’ll affect people. In his research, he uses modeling that looks at different types of social vulnerability. Simply remove the natural hazard and focus on vulnerable populations and areas. Then use the physical model to tell you the areas that will be hardest hit by an earthquake or tsunami. He uses the 2015 Nepal earthquake to illustrate how current disaster recovery efforts are clumsy and actually detrimental to the situation: Countries around the world sent help via Katmandu airport and created a huge bottleneck, which hindered rescue efforts. If we could determine where help was needed in advance, we could save lives, he emphasizes. He uses USAID data on health and demographics and GPS data to see where people live. If we know a person’s social status, or “social endowments,” Wendelbo says we can see how vulnerable they are — and reverse engineer to solve the problem in advance. He envisions a software that, using geospatial info systems, would enable people to view a country and have it auto-populate with hazard risks. The data should be accessible to anyone: government, first responders, local citizens. He likes to say that disasters are not a consequence of hazards; it’s the hazard and how it affects people, depending on their level of wealth and education. He proposes modeling consequences of disaster (not just fatalities) based not only on where, but who people are. This information would help in disaster response – and in creating resilient communities. Currently, Wendelbo is studying the long-term consequences of earthquakes in Nepal, in terms of variables such as health, education, ethnicity and social “endowments.” For instance, war has a surprisingly enduring ability to render populations vulnerable to disasters, he says. War affects education, health, access to government services. If we can quantify such things, he says, we can quantify who will be hit, so we can prepare for it and respond better. His research is multidisciplinary and relies on academics in disciplines that do not normally communicate: for example, anthropology, natural science, economics. Because, he says, you have to model the physical hazards as well as human behavior. The benefit of such work, he says, is that it can potentially save tens of thousands of lives. Just consider the enormous expense of disaster relief, he says. We could save more lives if we invested the funds in advance — in resilience. But, he says, it is hard to get people’s attention, to persuade people to spend money on resilience. Wendelbo is interested in talking across disciplines — including with NHERI research engineers. He publishes essays and research at TheConversation.com, a publishing platform for academics and subject-matter experts. The articles are available to read and share under the Creative Commons license.