ABSTRACT
Drawing a sharp conceptual line between natural and humanitarian disasters is difficult because of the mutual relationships among them that all too often lead to humanitarian crises. In fact, the notion of any disaster has a human component, not necessarily in a causal, but always is an affected sense. Without human reference or any impact on the anthropogenic sphere, a natural event like an earthquake, a landslide, or a river flood would rather be considered a disturbance in the sense of an episodic event inherent to an (eco-)system’s integrity. Moreover, due to climate change and other large-scale anthropogenic effects, natural disasters apparently increase both in terms of occurrence and severity (IPCC 2001); thus the term “natural” is even more deceptive. In order to find a (pragmatic) borderline to literature dealing with natural disasters in a stricter sense, we shall concentrate on disasters that are either caused or reinforced by crises or conflicts, whether they ultimately root in natural (e.g., a drought spanning over several years) or societal causes (any type of aggression, fights over resources, etc.). This corresponds, again with many transitions and uncertainties, to the field of humanitarian action. Unlike natural disaster response, which operates in fairly distinct phases in a rather distinct disaster management cycle (Joyce et al. 2009), humanitarian action faces more gradual, at times protracted, response phases. In particular, humanitarian conflict situations often lack a distinct peak situation (as compared to catastrophic events such as floods, earthquakes, or wildfires); thus, it is hard to pinpoint the exact point in time when a man-made conflict leads to a humanitarian disaster. While conceptually disconnected here, natural disasters or resource scarcity/abundance may overlay and reinforce conflict situations or contribute to secondary risks through the outbreak of a disease or other calamities (e.g., as in the case .of the Haiti earthquake in 2010).
