ABSTRACT
This chapter brings the attention of stakeholders in disaster management and discourses that many of the hazards and disasters labelled as natural actually, and increasingly so, have an anthropogenic component. In this perspective people's find support in the term socio-natural hazard and its definition provided and commented on by the UN Office for Disaster Risk Reduction (UNISDR). Environmental degradation has a negative impact on health. Roughly one-quarter of the global disease burden is attributable to environmental risk factors, which play a role in 80 per cent of the diseases regularly reported by the World Health Organization (WHO). Environmental standards and living conditions are often precarious, including massive problems stemming from, inter alia, air pollution, unsafe water, and the global consequences of climate change and nuclear threats. As climate change is the most comprehensive and complex appearance of environmental degradation, so too are its interrelations with disability.
