Social Impact of Disasters

Every year, disasters affect the lives of millions of people around the world in many different ways. For social scientists, the social impacts of disasters are the multiple effects that potentially destructive agents can have on society. The magnitude of a destructive agent is not defined by its physical characteristics, but by the level of disruption that it has on society and how it affects people and their livelihoods. Therefore, the disaster is not an illustration of the intensity or magnitude of the agent, but of the arrangements of a society. As a consequence, destructive agents with similar characteristics may have different social impacts for different groups, depending on the social arrangements of society. For a disaster to occur, it is necessary for the potentially destructive agent to intersect with a group in a socially produced condition of vulnerability. The social context, distribution of power, and local and customary social relations lay out the social impacts of disasters.

The study of the social impacts of disasters can be traced to the beginning of the 20th century. One of the first studies known to provide a definition of disasters focusing on their social aspects is the study of the Hallifax explosion, conducted by Samuel Henry Prince in the 1920s. Another early study is that of Lowell Juilliard Carr in 1932, which first described disasters as directly related to social change. The first scientific definition of disasters was offered in 1961 by Charles Fritz. Earlier definitions of disasters presented them as resulting from the impact of an external agent. At the time, disasters were approached as unusual events that had negative impacts on society. Another milestone in the development of disaster research was the establishment in 1963 of the Disaster Research Center (DRC) by Enrico Quarantelli, Russell Dynes, and Eugene Haas. The DRC was the first center in the world to be devoted to the systematic study of the social aspects of disasters.

From the earlier definitions of disasters, the hazard-vulnerability approach emerged, defining disasters as the result of the intersection of a hazard agent with a social system. This approach renders more importance on the capacity of people by focusing on their positions in a social system, and how this defines the effects of the intersection with a destructive agent. Other recent theoretical developments focus on disasters as crisis situations resulting from the growing complexity of society, and the incapacity of people to define the situation.