Environmental Geography Blog

So What Can I Do With Geography?

2010-12-20T04:37:00.000-08:00

Back to blogging after focusing on teaching this term. A question that seems to arise more and more through Open Days and discussion with both students and parents is what can I do with Geography? With fees in the UK about to go up to between 6,000 and 9,000 pounds (the pound sign doesn't work on my computer!), there is an understandable concern that both students and parents don’t want to waste their money on degrees that are in their view ‘worthless’. Ideally you would want a degree that places you in the right hand box of Figure 1 (taken from the website of the University of the West Indies). This box is a good place to be in a job market which is relatively static and in which you can be relaxed about the future but if you specialise too much is there a risk that if the economic or technology change then you could swiftly move into the left box or even bottom right box? Selecting a degree is as much about retaining flexibility in employability and in employable skills into the future as it is about choosing the right degree for your immediate career ambitions.

Figure 1 Employability matrix

Most geography departments in most universities will have a policy on employability and will either incorporate transferable and employability skills into their curriculum or provide separate units that tackle employability. The problem for a subject like geography is that, unlike something like Pharmacy or Engineering, there are few individuals who call themselves Geographers that you can point to and say ‘look see that is what you can do’. Like a lot of degrees geography provides essential transferable skills that employers seek as several websites note and as outlined in Table 1.

Table 1 General Employability Skills in a Degree

In addition, Geography offers a set of skills that are subject specific and which can help students gain jobs in different sectors such as those discussed on the GEES (Geography, Earth and Environmental Science) website. The skills are outlined below and divided into knowledge, skills and competencies. On some degree courses particular practical skills will be emphasised more than on other courses so if you want a particular skill for a particular career then it is important to select a course with this in mind.

Knowledge, Skills and Competencies

Knowledge
• Cultural, political, economic and environmental issues incorporating local, regional and international perspectives.
• Moral and ethical issues arising from an understanding of diversity in people and places.
• Issues of globalisation, environmental sustainability, multiculturalism and citizenship.

Thinking Skills
• Expertise in integrating, analysing and synthesising information from a range of sources, gained by working with complex environments and issues.

Practical Skills
• By routinely working in teams on laboratory, desk and field-based research, geographers are versed in project management including planning, execution and evaluation; this involves skills such as time-management, risk-assessment, problem solving and analysis.
• Geography requires the generation and use of a diversity of data types (text, numbers, images and maps). They therefore have well-developed literacy, numeracy and graphicacy skills and are accustomed to manipulating and presenting these various data using a range of ICT formats, including geographical information systems (GIS).
• The complex ‘real-world’ nature of geographical research requires geographers to be flexible and adaptable – they must have the confidence and initiative to be able to deal with the unexpected.

To access a word document produced by my colleagues at Portsmouth, Dr Brian Baily,please click HERE. This document provides prospective and current undergraduates with advice and links to a range of website dealing with employability for Geography. I hope you find this a useful resource.

Risk and Heuristics

2010-09-26T08:05:00.000-07:00

The perception of risk affects how people behave. People tend to simplify the world; to use simple heuristics to help them understand risk and how they should behave in the face of risks. These simple rules affect how much insurance they buy, where they live, how dangerous they believe modern life is. Quoting facts and figures may do little to alter people’s behaviour or the hold of these heuristics. Studying the types of heuristics people have about risk has been a fruitful are of research since the 1970s when Tversky and Kahneman undertook their early studies (e.g. 1974, Judgment under uncertainty, Science, 185, 1124-1131). Amongst the numerous heuristics that have been researched I want to consider just three in this blog – representativeness, availability and anchoring – in the light of environmental risk.

Representativeness refers to people’s ability or tendency to view risk in one area as comparable to risk in another if the two areas, at least to them, resemble each other. Crime, whatever, its complexion may provide a convenient category for people to fear even if the causes of terrorism are different from bag snatching. The classing of both as crimes may connect the different activities as comparable in people’s minds. A previous blog discussed the media hype behind the BP oil spill. Media reports kept comparing the spill to the Exxon Valdez, forming a comparability connection in people’s minds. Both are oil spills, so they must be comparable. A closer examination of the causes and characteristics of each casts some doubt on their comparability. One was tanker spill, the other a massive, destructive blowout; one occurred in a confined water body, the other a dynamic ocean; one was associate with stark images and immediate of dying wildlife, the other with less obvious and visually striking losses of livelihoods. Yet, calling each an oil spill implies similarities in nature and similarities in response. Pointing out differences may do little to make people think that the things are different.

The ongoing floods in Pakistan are another example. Third world floods, again, may be the immediate response of some readers and viewers. The same sort of floods seems to happen every year, somewhere over there, surely by now they should know what to do? Classifying the event as a flood brings with it the risk of comparison with other events in the same class. By comparison the death toll seems small, by comparison the event seems slow, by comparison it happens a long way away. Such comparisons can become a convenient short-hand to explaining or justifying a lack of action or the vigorousness of a response. Classing an event may help to understand it but there is also a danger that we assume that as it is a member of that sort of event, we understand what it should do and how we should behave towards it. At the crudest level, for example, how many people should be dead to make it an important flood, rather than looking at the individuality of each event. Floods are different in causes, consequences and solutions; one size fitting all is as inappropriate for environmental hazards as it is for understanding most things.

The flood example is also an illustration of availability bias. Availability bias refers to the tendency for people to respond to risks more vigorously when examples of that type of risk are readily available to them. Availability may be from individual or community memory, from the media, from their beliefs about the world and any number of other sources. The Pakistan floods are compared to the impact of other floods we call to mind most readily whatever their cause. Similarly, the BP oil spill is contrasted in the media with the Exxon Valdez, as the latter is viewed as a key environmental event and so a sort of benchmark for other events, however inappropriate or appropriate the comparison might be.

On a more personal level, the fact that you may have experience a flood of your home in the last two or three years, may make you more wary of the flood risk and so more likely to purchase insurance or to try to at least as insurance companies using the same bias may raise premiums to match the increased perception of risk in your local area. Statistically, the local flood may not alter the probability of future flooding by much, if at all, but does it feel like that to you as you wade through your sodden possessions?

Anchoring refers to an individual’s or community’s starting point for assessing risk. Usually people start from a particular value that they belie is associated with a particular type of risk or event and then adjust their estimation of the risk (or its seriousness) in the light of further information. The adjustment will, however, always be in relation to that initial starting value. In other words, for the same physical risk or event, two individuals, one with a low initial estimate, the other with a high one, will interpret any further information about the risk or event in the light of their initial starting values. After the event, it is likely that both will have moved from their initial estimates but the person with the initial low value will still have a lower estimation of the risk than the person with the initial high estimation.

Once again the two recent disasters of the BP oil spill and the floods in Pakistan can be interpreted as examples of anchoring. How do you judge the impact of the BP oil spill? Initial estimates by the company and environmental groups varied. BP trying to downplay the incident, some environmental groups proclaiming nightmarish scenarios for the future of the Gulf. As the event has unfolded how have each side changed its rhetoric? BP has slowly admitted the spill was worst than initial thought, at least in terms of the amount of oil released into the ocean. Images of environmental annihilation of the Gulf have not emerged. So do you adjust your assessment of the damage wrought by the oil spill up or down as evidence and opinion have increased? Does it depend on where you started – as a committed environmentalist or as a company supporter? Does it really matter where you start, doesn’t the evidence speak for itself? Evidence is always interpreted so these heuristics are important.

Aid for the floods in Pakistan may have suffered from an anchoring effect. The areal extent of the disaster is huge and the impact and suffering caused by the floods is both massive and real, but the initial death toll seemed minor in comparison to other disasters in recent memory, such as the Haitian earthquake or the Boxing Day tsunami. It may be simplistic but impact and death toll may be related in people’s mind and a low death toll anchors the flood disaster relatively low down in a mental pecking order or recent disasters. Subsequent media coverage, celebrity appeals and governmental and UN urging for aid may be interpreted in the light of this initial anchor point.

As an additional thought, what is your individual anchor point in the ongoing ‘discussions’ about the need to reduce expenditure on public spending to clear public deficits? The debate seems to have moved beyond do we need to? The debate only seems to be how severely do we need to? Accepting the need is as much an anchor as setting an amount. I may be overly cynical but if leaks suggest a 40% cut in the spending of a government department and a review finally recommends only 30%, then you can’t help but feel a little relieved it is lower than you expected. Anchoring is a very strong tool in setting agendas both for environmental issues and for politics in general.

Measuring Resilience

2010-09-12T02:57:00.000-07:00

The recent BBC commissioned research of resilience in the England by Experian (http://publicsector.experian.co.uk/Products/Local%20Economic%20Resilience.aspx) factsheets are available at http://publicsector.experian.co.uk/Products/~/media/FactSheets/Strategy%20and%20research/Local%20economic%20resilience%20%20%20Sept10.ashx ) has produced some interesting results and highlights or confirms depending on your viewpoint, a clear north-south divide in terms the vulnerability and resilience of areas to the current economic climate, in particular to the expected government cuts in spending (http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-11233799) . The northeast is identified as the most vulnerable or least resilient area (http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-11141264) with explanation of this focusing on the number of people employed in public sector jobs, the history of closures in large tradition industrial employers such as iron and steel and the lack of likely job creation in the private sector. The vulnerability of the northeast is contrasted with locations such as St Albans where the entrepreneurial spirit and the knowledge based industry focus are highlighted.

Any attempt to measure vulnerability and resilience is a good idea. Trying to put numbers to these issues is useful in debate and in identifying factors that may be important in the ability of an area to resist major events, which an economic downturn and a round of spending cuts are, even if they are economic and political rather than geophysical events. Care needs to be taken, however, to understand that these figures, any figures, that try to capture such a complex and slippery set of concepts will never succeed in illuminating every conceptual facet. It should also be borne in mind that merely having the figures can begin to set the agenda for the debate by focusing on the particular metrics used in compiling the figures. Any data collection will have some model of reality behind it, some idea of what determines resilience and vulnerability, and so will always collect data in the light of that model. Experian have published their methodology in detail on the BBC website (http://news.bbc.co.uk/nol/shared/spl/hi/uk/10/experian/doc/methodology.doc ) as well as the Excel data files upon which the analysis is based (http://news.bbc.co.uk/nol/shared/spl/hi/uk/10/experian/xls/resilience.xls ). This is, in my view, an excellent idea as it allows everyone to understand how the final indices are created and provides hints about the model of reality behind the numbers.

Experian view economic resilience as describing the ability of an area to withstand and respond to shocks in an external environment. Economic resilience is composed of four themes: business, community, place and people. Each is weighed differently in terms of it contribution to the overall index, with the business variables accounting for 50%, with the other themes accounting for about 17% each. Each theme is described by a series of question. Business, for example, contains questions such as how strong is the local business base? Is it dependent on sectors that have been hit by recession? Are businesses dependent on local markets, or do they export? People contains questions about age of population, their jobs and earnings. Community contains questions about life expectancy, do neighbours look out for each other and long-term unemployment. Lastly, place contains questions on house prices, green space and GCSE attainment rates. Experian use 33 variables to create the index and do state that the variables used were dictated, at least in part, by the data available at local authority level.

The actual variables used are listed for each theme and range from insolvency rates, to business density, to % of population who are corporate managers, deprivation and crime rates.

This is the basic outline of the analysis and its methodology, so from the viewpoint of environmental geography what can be asked and interpreted from this analysis? Firstly, is the unit of analysis used, the local authority area, the most appropriate for what they are trying to analyse, economic resilience? The LA may be a unit for which there is lots of data as it is an administrative unit but is it the unit within which businesses operate? Do businesses locate within local authorities or within business parks (maybe with incentives from local authorities) or where successful business or businesses like them are already located? Similarly, is the local authority really an appropriate area within which to judge community? Are communities this big? You all probably know your own local authority area, do you think it is that homogeneous, are all parts of it really that similar or are there ‘good’ and ‘bad’ bits? The appropriate unit of analysis is a continual problem in geography and, to be fair to Exeprian, they have taken a unit for which there is a lot of data and for which data is collected. This data is not collected fro the type of analysis Exeprian have undertaken so it doesn’t exactly match what they would like to be available but virtually every survey has this problem as well. The important thing to bear in mind is that whatever spatial unit you select to use there will always be problems and there will always be a geography below or above the unit you select. It is down to you to decide if these other geographies are more appropriate.

Secondly, the method of ranking local authorities for different themes and then combining ranks can be misleading. A small, fractional percentage difference between two local authorities may be the difference between being ranked 5th adn 6th whilst a 10% difference may result being ranked 320th and 321st. You do not get any feel for the magnitude of the differences between areas. This is compounded once you combine ranks. So a drop between being 1st and 25th in the business themes may only reflect a slight difference in the absolute, numerical values of variables but is represented by a large number of places in the ranksing. A drop from 200th to 201st in the rankings may represent the same absolute differences in the magnitude of the variables as between the first 25 areas in the rankings. The raw data is needed to assess how the rankings and absolute changes match up. It shoudl be noted, however, that Experian do state that they have considered the correlation between variables in their analysis, another key issue in derving a meaningful statistic.

Thirdly, what do the variables used tell us bout the type of economy that Experian view as resilient and as vulnerable? The business variables depict resilience as being determined by a strong private sector and one that is not reliant upon its local market for its existence. Innovation, knowledge-based and able to draw on a reserve pool of skilled labour seem to be other important determinants of a strong business theme. Does this match your image of a strong, contemporary economy? What about the provision of infrastructure – or is that down to the private sector as well? Public services are viewed as a weakness in the local economy despite the need for provision of such services to support the private sector. If you have an aim to convert public to private then an area where private enterprise is strong are likely to be areas that rapidly take on public services once aspects of them are privatised. Likewise, people variable focuses on level of qualification and level of corporate managers in the population, once again highlighting the potential for a privatisation of the public. The focus on knowledge-based services may also suggest a preference for small firms as drivers of the local economy rather than large employers.

Thirdly, the community and place variables once again have a model of what is ‘good’ and ‘bad’ behind them. Indices such as long-term unemployment, claimant count and income vulnerability (likely to affect lower paid but increasingly the middle income as well) all point to a relatively inflexible work force in terms of skill development relevant for the sectors identified as important in the business variables, e.g. knowledge-based services. Place variables are a more mixed bunch ranging for educational attainment (related to skills again) through to crime rates and house prices. Do you feel these variables really reflect the feelings and strengths of communities and their networks of relations? The variables seem very static and unable to grasp the dynamic nature of such relations.

Overall, the Experian map is a great starting point in the debate over resilience and vulnerability to economic events and, potentially, other events as well. But it is only a starting point and like any analysis it is limited by the data available and will have underlying assumptions about what is ‘good’ and ‘bad’ based on a particular view of how the economy functions or should function. At least there is now a basis for discussion but the survey should not become an anchor point that sets the agenda without question.

BP Oil Spill: Content of the Accident Investigation Report

2010-09-10T07:00:00.001-07:00

In my previous blog I looked at the context of the report, in this blog I want to look at the content of the report (report available at http://www.bp.com/sectiongenericarticle.do?categoryId=9034902&contentId=7064891). The investigation identified eight key causes that combined to produce the incident. The eight are:

The annulus cement barrier did not isolate the hydrocarbons
The shoe track barriers did not isolate the hydrocarbons
The negative-pressure test was accepted although well integrity had not been established
Influx was not recognised until hydrocarbons were in the riser
Well control response actions failed to regain control of the well
Diversion to the mud gas separator resulted in gas venting onto the rig
The fire and gas system did not prevent hydrocarbon ignition
The blowout preventer (BOP) emergency mode did not seal the well

For each of these causes some articles assign blame to BP and its contractors (e.g. BBC report - http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-us-canada-11230757, Guardian article - http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/blog/2010/sep/08/bp-oil-spill-report-deepwater-horizon-blame-game). But how did the team investigate the cause within their TOR?

Appendix I of the report outlines the method used: fault tree analysis. Fault tree analysis (FTA) is a standard method of analysing technical failures of systems using Boolean logic to combine a series of lower level or previous events. Originally developed in 1962 to analyse ICBM launch control systems (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fault_tree_analysis), the analysis starts with the undesired event as the top of the tree and then breaks the possible causes down into subsystems and assesses how these prior causes or initiators could arise. The analysis relies upon experts being able to identify how subsystems and their components fail and how these failures can build up to produce the top event, the undesired event (Figure 1). Once identified, each subsystem can be analysed to assess if it was likely to be the source of failure in the cascade that results in the top event. Failure of lower subsystem can be prevented from producing a cascade of failures to the top event if some intervening subsystem does not fail. The number of possible ways failure can occur increases as the number of subsystems increases. As the number of subsystems reduces as the top event is approached, providing fail-safe systems becomes increasingly important as there are fewer and fewer pathways to failure. The process of creating and analysing a fault tree is systematic and logical and, where information is available, probabilities can even be assigned to specific events within the branches of the tree so a likelihood of an incident can be calculated.

Figure 1 Illustratin of Fault Tree Analysis

Within Appendix I there are four fault trees outlined based on the four critical factors identified by the investigation team; well integrity, hydrocarbons entering well undetected and loss of well control, hydrocarbons igniting on Deepwater Horizon and blowout preventer not sealing the well. These four fault trees are focus of investigation and are the context in which all evidence is collected and evaluated. The team assigned each box as a possible contributing factor to be investigated, designating, where possible, if the box represented a ‘possible immediate cause’ or a ‘possible system cause’. Simplistically, ‘possible immediate cause’ can be equated to mechanical or technical failure, whilst ‘possible system cause’ can be equated with failure of communication, human mistakes of interpretation and procedures. In addition, within each box there was either a reference to a specific section of the report for further discussion, a statement that evidence ruled out that cause or a statement that the evidence was inconclusive for that cause.

Figure 2 Illustration of branches of fault tree associated with well intregity

Figure 2 illustrates a subsection of the fault tree for well integrity. This subsection of the FTA shows that more details are available in the appropriate section of the full report, but for this branch of the fault tree, all the possible causes can be ruled out based on the evidence collected. Figure 3 shows the end branches for a section of the fault tree and in this case the interaction between ‘immediate possible cause’ and ‘possible system causes’ illustrates that it is not a simple answer of either mechanical or system failure but more likely to be a complicated combination of both as you analyse the branches. Both these figures are not chosen to point to the most important cause but rather to illustrate the reasoning behind the conclusions and recommendations of the investigation team.

Figure 3 Illustration of end branches of fault tree showing possible immediate and possible system causes

The investigation team used the Swiss-cheese model to illustrate how the four critical factors and eight causes were related (Figure 4). The barriers are the defensive physical and operational barriers that were meant to prevent an incident. Although the figure makes the key relationships easier to understand it does not show the intricate web of relations that tied all the actants, physical and human, together in the complex system that produced the event. The figure does not show the web behind the barriers nor how the barriers are defined and set up in the first place. As I said in an earlier blog, experience tends to influence what is seen as important for operation and for prevention; a new incident can alter this perception and so alter what is regarded as important for different barriers and may even identify new barriers to consider in new environments or contexts. Many of the recommendations made are aimed at improving the links and flow of information between the human actants in the system to ensure that information derived about the physical actants, such as well pressure, is interpreted in a consistent and appropriate manner and that it is clear what actions should be taken and when. Likewise, the investigation highlighted the need for information flows about the state of these actants needs to be improved, such as the condition of critical components in the yellow and blue control pods for the BOP, are maintained at the standard required for them to operate correctly.

Figure 4 Illustration of Swiss cheese model of hazards analysis based on Deepwater Horizon report

BP Oil Spill: Accident Investigation Report

2010-09-10T06:55:00.000-07:00

BP released the report of its internal investigation team on the Deepwater Horizon accident on 8th September 2010 (http://www.bp.com/sectiongenericarticle.do?categoryId=9034902&contentId=7064891). Media coverage of the report has made much of the alleged attempts to divert blame for the accident onto other companies; contractors involved in the operation and maintenance of the oil rig (e.g. Who’s blamed by BP for the Deepwater horizon oil spill - http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-us-canada-11230757, BP oil spill report: the Deepwater horizon blame game- http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/blog/2010/sep/08/bp-oil-spill-report-deepwater-horizon-blame-game, BP oil spill: US reaction to the BP report - http://www.telegraph.co.uk/finance/newsbysector/energy/oilandgas/7990442/BP-oil-spill-US-reaction-to-the-BP-report.html). Robert Preston, the BBC’s business editor even dubbing BP as standing for ‘Blame Placing’ (http://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/thereporters/robertpeston/2010/09/bp_stands_for_blame_placing.html). This blog looks at the report in context; a second blog will deal with the findings themselves.

The report itself is at pains to point out that it is own limitation. The second paragraph of the executive summary, for example, states:
“In preparing this report, the investigation team did not evaluate evidence against legal standards, including but not limited to standards regarding causation, liability, intent and the admissibility of evidence in court or other proceedings.”
Deepwater Horizon Accident Investigation Report: Executive Summary, 2010, p.2.

The report notes it had to work with the information available to it and draw interpretations from sometimes contradictory, unclear and uncorroborated evidence that used the ‘best judgement’ of the team, but from which others might draw different conclusions. The report even finishes with a section on what the team could not analyse. So is the report a PR exercise, an attempt to deflect blame or a genuine attempt to provide some rapid, informative answers to the questions about what caused a major environmental disaster.

The report needs to be considered in the light of how industries operate in the contemporary economic environment. I am not concerned with legal definitions of responsibility nor intend to discuss these or get into such a debate as I am sure that such heated deliberations will ensue once money comes to the fore. Robert Preston’s blog is useful in illustrating the ‘hollowing out’ aspect of modern large companies such as BP. Companies no longer do everything; contracting out aspect of their industry that they are either not good at or that other companies can do better or more cheaply has become a common practice. BP may be an oil company but it does not undertake every aspect of the oil industry in house.

Robert Preston’s blog provides a good analogy of a dodgy chicken tikka masala bought from a supermarket. If you are ill after eating the meal do you blame the supermarket or its contracted manufacturers? He states that most people would hold the supermarket accountable although the contracted company may have had the sloppy hygiene standards that produce the dodgy meal. In his blog he does point out that BP were the named party on the relevant oil lease and so assumed to exercise sufficient oversight.

My view is that the example is a little too simplistic to grasp the complexity of relationships that define a modern business enterprise. Imagine instead that you want to get to work every day to do what you are good at. You are not good at driving nor want the expense of owning a car, so you contract out both hiring a driver and leasing a car. You specify that you need a driver who can take orders and a car that is a reasonable car for your status. You tell the driver you leave a 08:10 and must be at work at 08:30. Everything seems to run smoothly, the driver is well turned out, the car is comfortable and you get to work on time. One day there is an accident as the car overturns taking a corner – who is to blame? It may seem simple, the driver is to blame, he was driving – he is the person immediately, obviously involved in the accident, its cause. BUT you specified the time; he has to drive to ensure you get there on time. Is it the pressure you put him under that caused the accident? Furhter investigation points to some mechanical problems with the brakes. Not enough on its own to cause the accident but a possible contriubting cause. The car is maintained by the leasing company, who are good at leasing but not at maintenance so contract that out. But you specified only a standard maintenance contract,you didn't specify that there would be undue wear on the brakes as you don't drive so don't know how different driving styles affect brake wear. The subcontractor states it is nothing to do with them as they maintained it to the standard specified. Where does the cause lie? With mechanical problems, with your communciation with your contractors, with your ability to specify exactly what you require or with your understanding of the context?

I hope you can start to see the problem. Such a complex web of relationships requires careful and thoughtful planning and overseeing. Relations and specifications need to be established carefully and maintained. Importantly, you may not realise there is a problem with the relations or specification until there is a problem. The problem itself highlights the errors, by which time it is too late. This does not absolve you of blame it just shows how difficult it is to pin down exactly who or what is the cause. Causation and blame may be different things entirely.

It is within this context of devolved tasks that the investigation team undertook the report. Central to this report, in fact any report, are the terms of reference, TOR, found in Appendix A of the report. The scope of the report is defined as finding facts surrounding the uncontrolled release of hydrocarbons and efforts to contain that release aboard the Transocean drillship Deepwater Horizon. More specifically, the team will determine the actual physical conditions, controls and operational regime related to the incident to understand a) the sequence of events, b) the reasons for initial release, c) the reasons for fire, d) efforts to control flow at the initial event. As well as a timeline for the event itself, the team were also tasked to described the event and identify critical factors, both immediate causes and system causes. As with any TOR, the terms are narrower than you might want to try to understand the event in totality and, as is common with such an event, the key focus is on the technical and procedural. The team are not tasked to apportion blame within their TOR, they are merely seen as reporting ‘the facts’. Clearly, ‘the facts’, as in people’s actions and recollections, depend on what they are told and upon who tells them, what hidden agendas each person might have. Instruments and equipment, where available, tell another set of stories which may at first seem more objective but once different experts begin to interpret the information may become almost as ambiguous as the recollections of fallible humans.

The focus on the initial release and the events leading up to the explosion of necessity spotlights the actions of individuals in the decision making at that time. Despite this, a number of issues concerning equipment, maintenance and instructions are highlighted as requiring improvement suggesting that systemic factors may be more important. In other words, the communication and relations between companies is as much at the heart of the event as the faulty decisions made at the time.

Interestingly, the investigation team had 5 specific terms of reference associated with administration, including the sanctioning of all activities by a team leader, the requirement of a BP person at each interview and on questions or tasks to BP contractors without BP approval. The impact of such administrative arrangements on the nature or scope of the questions asked is not discussed. How are these administrative requirements to be interpreted? As a standard implementation of policy in such investigations, as a check on the team adhering to the TOR or ensuring the TOR were clarified to the team when required? Your interpretation may depend on the degree of belief or trust in have in the internal report in the first place.

The complexity of the task of assigning causation and blame is highlighted by the team in the Executive Summary:
'The team did not identify any single action or inaction that caused this accident. Rather, a complex and interlinked series of mechanical failures, human judgments, engineering design, operational implementation and team interfaces came together to allow the initiation and escalation of the accident. Multiple companies, work teams and circumstances were involved over time.'
Deepwater Horizon Accident Investigation Report: Executive Summary, 2010, p.5.

But why produce and release the internal report to the public now? There are other reports in the pipeline, not the least the official report into the incident that will presumably form the basis for blame, responsibility and one would assume compensation claims. BP may be trying to show themselves as a responsible company, but there is also the possibility that they are putting the report out there as a marker, an anchor for further reports. Whatever the status of the BP internal report, it is now known and available, it provides information and interpretations that any other report will be compared to. BP have provided an anchor or a starting point for expectations. Other reports will need to refer to it, to agree or disagree with it, to confirm or reject its findings and assertions. BP might not have defined the agenda for the debate over responsibility that will develop but they have defined the starting points and details that all other reports will have to cover; so not a bad start to agenda setting.

Haddon Matrix and Hazardous Events

2010-09-03T06:50:00.000-07:00

Looking at hazards in different ways, through different conceptual frameworks is always useful as it tends to make you think about things, however slightly, in a different way. A framework often used in injury prevention, in road accident research and public health is the Haddon Matrix. This was devised by William Haddon back in the 1970s for use in road traffic accidents. The basic matrix is divided into 12 cells. The rows are defined by the temporal aspect of the event; pre, during and post, whilst the columns are defined as ‘host’ (you could rethink this as ‘the individual’), ‘equipment’ and two for environment; one for ‘physical’, one for ‘social’. The idea is to fill in each of the cells with key aspects that will influence or did the hazardous event. Effectively you are playing out different scenarios and filling in the cells depending on what factors you see as significant in each scenario. The framework forces you to deal systematically with the nature of the hazard and how it might play out in reality.

The example provided is for road traffic accidents but the basis can be translated to other types of hazard. In the crash, the condition of the individual before the crash may be important for the reasons in the matrix. Each individual will have different characteristics that could be important and each can be included as appropriate. Simiarly, different aspects of the equipment will be important depending on the nature of the crash and so these factors may not be clear until after the event. The environmental factors, seem to be more diffuse and provide a context, that for certain types of individual behaviour and certain equipment failings produce an environment conducive to a hazardous event. Importantly, despite the descirption and divsion of the event into these spearate cells, the contents of each cell depends upon the relationships between the host, equipment and environment. Fro eample, the scoial norms that permit DUI, would not be improtant had not the host not had a seatblet and been drinking. The poorly designed fuel tanks only become significant when the drunk driver crahse and so on.

This framework does have its limitations. The recognition of important factors can be so wide ranging as to be useless in planning if extreme scenarios, with infinitesimal probabilities of occurring are considered. On the other hand, it may not be until the event happens that it becomes clear what factors are important. The matrix will probably be of most use when similar hazardous events are being considered, as similar events would be expected to have roughly similar important factors. The matrix can also be used to identify where particular factors are not relevant. In a pile-up on a foggy motorway, for example, the detailed life history of the individual in the second car in the crash may not have any significance to their survival, it is the general physical conditions that are of over-riding significance. Equipment factors, such as airbag installation, age of car, may have an impact however. In other words, the matrix might be useful to explore the topographies of different hazards or disaster; in exploring the nature or shape of the hazard and what factors dominate that landscape and which are incidental ‘bumps’ on the terrain (please excuse the landscape metaphor, but I am a physical geographer!)

Something useful might be gained by overlaying the matrix with the Swiss cheese model of Reason outlined in an earlier blog. The matrix framework helps to identify the factors that might be important at each stage; the Swiss cheese identifies if a particular trajectory of factors lines up to produce a disaster. The matrix helps identify the possibles, the Swiss cheese, whether these possibles are important in combination. In the case of the BP oil spill, for example, the Haddon matrix could be used to identify key pre, during and post disaster factors, such as the alleged failure in safety procedures and lack of disaster planning. The trajectory arrow of the Swiss cheese model can then be used to assess if this one failure affects the next layer, if one failure or factor then lines up with another to produce the cascade of errors that result in a disater.

HAZARDS AND RISK

2010-09-03T05:56:00.000-07:00

Risk is a tricky thing to pin down and, as with most things in hazards analysis, open to a wide range of interpretations. A useful website for discovering just how open to debate this term is is John Adams website (http://john-adams.co.uk/). We all encounter risk everyday. The financial markets have just collapsed under the weight of risks. We drive along the motorway aware of the risk of other drivers (at least I hope everyone else does as I do!). We weigh up the risk to our health, the length of our life, of another drink, another cigarette, another burger or pie. Or do we?

Risk can seem to be such an easy thing to define. You can work out the probability of something occurring- the probability of dying from smoking a specific number of cigarettes per day, the probability of a specific amount of alcohol per day giving you cancer, the probability of contracting cancer given a specific level of exposure to radiation. Trouble is people often act as if they don’t know these probabilities exist.

Risk can be defined accurately, mathematically and scientifically using statistical analysis. Risk can be defined as the chance of a particular defined hazard or event occurring. If you now the frequency of occurrence of a particular level of flow in a river then you can work out the probability in any one year that there will be a flow of a given magnitude. Leaving aside problems of how long does the record of flows need to be to be representative, how well are extreme events represented in that record and many other factors, the key point is that, in theory, risk can be calculated from such records. Risk can be given a number: a fixed value that informs people and what they should do. Btu why should risk bother you? Risk only becomes important because you feel you might have something to loss. Risk can only be defined in relation to loss, so only within a context of fear or loss. It can be refined as a simple equation of:

RISK = [Hazard (probability) x Loss (expected)]/ Preparedness (loss mitigation)

You can see how each bit of the equation could be given a number. The hazard from scientific analysis of the geophysical nature of the hazard or rather the probability of the hazardous event. Loss can be calculated by the amount of money you would need to replace what you could lose if the event happened. Preparedness, more tricky, but maybe how much you can pay to insure against you loss by that hazardous event. But is this all risk really is?

There are other ways of looking at risk.

Risk can be defined as being a real thing, out there and so subject to scientific and mathematical analysis and calculations that are common across experts.
Risk can be seen as a cultural and social phenomenon created by the society we live in and so subject to change as that society changes
Risk can be defined legally as a responsibility or a failure of expected conduct
Risk can be defined psychologically as a set of behaviours and understandings about the world
Risk can be defined within the humanities as an emotional phenomena and as a story or narrative

Each of these different definitions illuminates different aspects of risk and may ring true with individuals in different circumstances. When watching news reports about floods in Pakistan, for example, I am seeing risk as a story or narrative dictated by the media and its beliefs about how I expect the disaster to unfold. Never underestimate the tight constraints of such storylines in affecting how we see things. Risk of injury on a building site could be viewed through the lens of legal definitions of risk and responsbility. The reactions of individuals to flooding and flood risk could be viewed through the lens of psychology. Some people believe in the risk and insure, others don’t and save their money – are the first group risk averse, the second risk takers or is it more complicated than that?

There is another way of defining risk, either singularly or in combination.
- Real: the calculation approach as above plus objective below
- Objective: the risk is real, a thing and it is out there for us to study and quantify
- Observed: Risk we can measure given our particular view of the world (and given it is real and objective)
- Subjective: Risk is about mental states of individuals who are only human and so plagued by fear, worry, uncertainty and doubt
- Perceived: subjective estimate of risk by individual or group
I would argue that all risk is perceived and that risk tends to be defined by the judgements of people, singularly and in groups, based on their application of some knowledge or information about the uncertainty involved, where this knowledge or information is objective, observed or subjective. When we believe or precieve the risk to be generated by some real, physical phenomenon then we can meausre it and calculate risk. This does not mean others will share our view of the world as objective nor our view of risk as soemthing objective.

What this means is that the perception and belief of risk varies from individual to individual, from group to group, from place to place and even from event to event. Trying to model or generalize about the actions of individuals in the face of risk is difficult but in future blogs I hope to present some models and general ideas about how people have tackled this complicated problem of understanding how people perceive and react to risk.

Hazards: The Complexity Approach

2010-09-03T03:15:00.000-07:00

I was at a conference on water and risk at the start of the year. A very distinguished professor had delivered an extremely interesting talk on a key concept he had taken decades to get across to policy makers involved in development. As the presentations went on he became increasingly concerned and agitated that researchers should realise that they had to get their ideas across to policy makers who were not well versed in either the details of academic debate or the intricate nature of conceptual frameworks. He questioned a final year postgraduate about what the major new concept in hazard and risk was. Without hesitation the postgraduate replied ‘complexity’. The distinguished professor paused, audibly drew in a long breath and said ‘God help us!’

Complexity is, as the name implies, neither the easiest concept to get across nor the easiest one to illustrate. Part of this fogginess is because the concept is still evolving within hazard analysis. The fixed and clear definitions of what it is and how to use it are still in their infancy and still subject to intense academic debate (although a useful discussion of the concept is given in Smith and Petley, Environmental Hazards, 2009, Routledge). Different researchers from different field converge on a particular disaster and each applies their own view and meaning of complexity to the analysis of that disaster. So what follows is a partial interpretation of complexity thinking and hazards but one that I hope will nonetheless provide a flavour of how a new concept is starting to mesh and enhance hazards analysis.

Complexity theory is a borrowed, as most geographical concepts are, this time from physics and mathematics where it evolved from a detailed equation based theory into something that even geographers could begin to understand. The central idea is that a system of components operating together produces some output. This may not sound that dramatic but it is the type of output that is a little unexpected. Traditionally, it has tended to be assumed that you can understand something better if you start to pull it apart and study each component one by one, individually. Once you have a detailed knowledge of the components then you have a detailed knowledge of the system. Simplify the system to understand it. This is a highly reductionist view of reality and how you go about studying it. To understand a car you dismantle it and study each component in great detail then put the parts back together and you understand the car. Even with my limited mechanical knowledge, I can see this will not work! Complexity is a brake on this view of simplifying reality to study it.

Complexity recognises that real systems are complicate and intricate networks of components acting together in a variety of ways. Simply studying one component or even a small group, does nothing to help us understand how the system really works. It is the interactions, the relations, which drive the system that produce the emergent behaviour that we observe and try to study. In complexity theory the bits of the system, the actual components are still vital as without them the system would not exist, but to understand the system, to grasp how it works, it is the interactions, the relations and their changes that it is vital to understand. From these interactions there does tend to emerge some predictable forms of overall system behaviour. Sometimes, however, change the relations and the output can alter in unexpected and unpredictable ways. In this view of hazards, hazards and disasters occur not necessarily because of one factor but through a combination of and the complex interactions of a number of factors.

My earlier blog on the BP oil spill and the Swiss cheese model of hazards could be seen as an illustration of complexity in action. In this model, it is the interaction between specific ‘holes’ that results in the incident occurring, without this interaction there would be no incident, no explosion, no oil spill. This model is only one by which hazards can be understood however. My earlier blog on ash cloud again focuses no interactions, this time amongst a group of actants to start to form an understanding of how the system evolved and how the hazard itself became defined.

Hazards and Vulnerability

2010-09-03T02:10:00.000-07:00

Media reports and images are full of vulnerable people being struck by disasters. Film of families being rescued by inflatable boat in Pakistan has been common staple on recent news reports. When Hurricane Katrina smashed into New Orelans, it appeared the most vulnerable people in a developed country were being targeted by the disaster. It seems so clear but what do we actually mean by vulnerable? Leading on from this question is another important one. If we can define does this help us take steps to ensure these people are not affected by such hazards and disasters?

In a previous blog (Floods in Pakistan: Vulnerability) I began to discuss the complex nature of any definition of vulnerability and illustrated some of the issues using this ongoing disaster. If you want a simple definition then vulnerability can be defined as the potential for loss of life or property in the face of environmental hazards or environmental disasters (or indeed any hazard or disaster). Loss susceptibility is another term often used in relation to vulnerability. Other definitions include vulnerability as a threat to which people are exposed; vulnerability as the degree to which a system acts adversely to a hazard (whatever adverse might mean?!); differential risk for different social classes; interaction between risk and preparedness; inability to take effective measures; capacity of group to anticipate, cope with, resist and recover from impact of natural disaster. There are others and any one interested in the range of definitions used should have a look at Susan Cutter’s book, Hazards, vulnerability and environmental justice (2006, Earthscan). A key point to bear in mind is both the physical and human environments can be vulnerable. Physical systems can be fragile and susceptible to impacts as much as human systems. Outlining how these can be studied together will be the subject of a future blog. This blog will focus on social vulnerability, the vulnerability of the human part of the equation, rather than physical vulnerability.

Some other terms borrowed from ecology also tend to be used when researching vulnerability. Adaptation refers to the ability of the actants in the socio-ecological system to find strategies to adapt to the hazard or disaster. Resistance is the ability of the actants to resist the impact of the hazard or disaster. Resilience is the ability of the system to absorb, self-organise, learn and adapt to the hazard or disaster. A useful resource for vulnerability can be found at the web pages of Neil Adger (http://www.uea.ac.uk/env/people/adgerwn/adger.htm) and at the Resilience Alliance website (http://www.resalliance.org/1.php) a site looking at research into resilience of socio-ecological systems and sustainability. As with most things borrowed, once you change the context the meaning changes as well, so the application and use of these terms does not necessarily match their original, potentially more limited definitions in ecological research.

An important aspect of vulnerability is that it evolves; it changes as the nature of the disaster or hazard unfolds and as the people who are vulnerable response and react to their situations. This also highlights the importance of scale for defining vulnerability. What scale is appropriate? The individual can be viewed as an important unit, but the individual usually operates within the context of a family or household, so is this a more appropriate unit for analysing vulnerability and resilience? What about larger entities such as communities and governments? As you change the unit of analysis would you expect the different units to have the same type of vulnerability, the same ability to resist or the same characteristics of resilience? Once these different spatial entities interact, such as the provision of aid by the government to individuals, does this cross scalar interaction affect vulnerability and resilience? In other words, what seems like a simple thing is very complex to unravel in detail.

At heart vulnerability is about the differential ability or power to access resources by individuals and groups in society. To escape a flood you need the power or ability to get out of the area. You need a car, you need early warning, you need a friendly policeman to wave you through and protect you from the other people trying to escape on foot. These material things require resources and access to them at the appropriate time. There are static and dynamic aspects to this access to resources. The static aspects of vulnerability, might be capable of identification before a disaster strikes. At the simplest level, mapping socioeconomic groups gives an indication to the availability of funds to gain access to resources. Likewise, mapping similar census data such as lone parent numbers or age (elderly and young are less able to escape floods for example) could also indicate the vulnerability of a place. A useful site that discusses such mapping and has developed a specific means of measuring it, the index of social vulnerability, can be found at the University of South Carolina at the Hazards and Vulnerability Institute (http://webra.cas.sc.edu/hvri/) of which Susan Cutter is the Director.

There is also a dynamic aspect to vulnerability; the manner in which relationships are organised and the manner in which they change through normal times and then during and after a disaster. Such flows could include the transport infrastructure; a key aspect that appears to have failed during this disaster and which has dramatically affected the ability of the institution of government to maintain an effective relationship with vulnerable groups. At a local level, however, if the transport infrastructure that remains intact sufficient for the local population to move to safety and then initiate community based activities that represent resilience at that level? Importantly this dynamic aspect is concerned with pathways and relations, both physical between locations and places and social and emotion between peoples and between individuals and organizations. From the above it is clear that trying to understand vulnerability also means trying to udnerstadd its geography; how it varies in space and time and how people succumb to, adapt or try to overcome this geography.

CORRECTION: BP Oil Spill: Disaster, Media Hype or Fitting a Narrative?

2010-08-24T07:46:00.001-07:00

CORRECTION: CORRECTION: CORRECTION

I have only just noticed that because of some sloppy cutting and pasting the original blog on BP Oil Spill: Disaster, Media Hype or Fitting a Narrative? must have lost sense to the reader about halfway through (anything before that was really written like that!) Sorry about this but it is a lesson to me to read blogs through properly again and again even when you think you have already done so.

The new, edited blog is now available. The original incorrect blog has been deleted.

Floods in Pakistan: Why is aid so slow?

2010-08-23T16:19:00.000-07:00

You might ask if issues surrounding aid and aid distribution are a legitimate concern of environmental geography. I would argue anything that will impact upon the environment and people’s interactions with that environment is important. This includes flows of capital, aid, materials and their distribution to populations as well as the geography of these flows and their materialization in the environment. You may disagree with this vision of environmental geography but even in this case I hope the discussion below raises some questions concerning aid in general by focusing on this disaster in particular.

According to the Bank for International Settlements (BIS, an intergovernmental organization of international banks), the average daily turnover in foreign exchange markets as of April 2007 was estimated to be $3.98 trillion (en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foreign_exchange_market). The New York Stock Exchange in 2008 had an average daily trading value estimated at $153 billion (en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_York_Stock_Exchange). I mention these figures only to show that the volume and rate at which capital can be moved around financial markets, presumably as recorded and confirmed transactions between at least two individual parties, seems to be extremely rapid. Transference of aid seems to be a lot slower. I am sure it will be pointed out that aid is different; relief organisations collating individual pledges as well as governments pledging sums for aid. My question would be so what systems are these aid and governmental organizations using, why are they so much slower and couldn’t the systems financial markets use to speed transactions be looked at for lessons about how to move aid funds around more rapidly?

Two recent articles about the floods, one by Adrian Hamilton (Aid trickles while the waters flood, The Independent, 19th August 2010, http://www.independent.co.uk/opinion/commentators/adrian-hamilton/adrian-hamilton-aid-trickles-while-the-waters-flood-2056111.html ), the other by Rob Crilly (Pakistan flood aid from Islamic extremists. The Telegraph, 21st August 2010, www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/asia/pakistan/7957988/Pakistan-flood-aid-from-Islamic-extremists.html) present the key arguments and concerns that may underlie this issue of the slowness of aid contributions from the world.

Hamilton raises a number of issues that may be summarized by the term ‘trust erosion’ as he notes. The claims by David Cameron that Pakistan is an exporter of terrorism, the expectations amongst Pakistanis themselves that most of the aid will end up in the hands and accounts of the ruling elite, the recent experiences of government corruption in disasters (including the recent L'Aquila earthquake in Italy suggesting the issue is not one confined to ‘developing’ countries) are all mentioned as affecting the willingness of the public, specifically a Western public to give aid to help the victims of the disaster. People do not necessarily believe the funds will reach the people who need it most. Problems of the increasing frequency of ‘natural’ disasters (inducing 'compassion fatigue'), the tighter economic climate and the relatively low number of deaths (so far) are also put forward as possible factors but with less force. As an aside it woudl be interesting to know if there was any ethnic or regilious variation in hte amount of aid pledged by people - tricky to get at but it would provide very useful information.

Hamilton does make the comment that the general assumption of corruption is “grossly unfair to the local officials, the army commanders and the doctors who have pulled to, as well as the mosques and religious societies which have been quick to provide shelter and hand out food and drinking water in their localities.” The Western view sometimes interprets such activity as terrorist, or other such groups, trying to take advantage of a tragic situation. This is a topic developed at some length by Crilly in his article in the Telegraph. He reports from north-west Pakistan, from Nowshera where he outlines the relief work of the Islamist charity Falah-e-Insaniat, a charity he states is linked to the Jamaat-ud-Dawa (JuD), the terrorist group involved in the Mumbai terrorist attacks of 2008. Crilly notes that these militant charities are providing food, water, shelter, medicine and funds to local families and are winning the hearts and minds of local people by their reliable humanitarian actions, or by exploiting the disaster situation – depending on your viewpoint. He states that the charity claim that they can raise in a day the same amount as the Prime Minister’s disaster relief fund has obtain in total, about £1 million. They also add that they have thousands of volunteers and hundreds of collection points. They too state that no-one trusts the government, such is the general view of the level of corruption.

So what can be taken from these two articles. Firstly, I am not advocating supporting terrorist groups. I abhor violence. What both articles highlight is the need to plan and distribute aid using an appropriate network at the appropriate scale. Give a large, bureaucratic organization a task and it is likely to come up with a large, bureaucratic solution - unless that bureaucry is extremely felixble, innovative and open to novel solutions. The local religious organizations, the local Islamist charities, the local officials mentioned in each article seem to have developed or used local networks for allocation and distribution of scant resources. In the case of Falah-e-Insaniat, they also seem to have organized a system for rapidly acquiring funds and distributing them. If this organization can do why can’t others?

It may be that the context of these local organizations aids their relief work. The remoteness of the north-west and the recession of the flood waters plus the distribution of population may aid the development of such supportive local networks and hinder their translation to other parts of the country. It maybe that these local relief organizations ride on the back of existing local social and economic networks to achieve their goals. Such social and economic networks may not exist at the same scale in the rest of the country, again restricting the translation of the efforts of such organizations. But figuring out if such networks can be translated might enable aid to be more effective distributed and help slow down or even reverse trust erosion (trust deposition doesn’t sound right, so I will stop developing the metaphor there). If the West is worried about extremist groups winning the battle for the trust of people during and after this disaster maybe they would be wise to look at how this success is being achieved and to think about what is an appropriate scale of response and what scale of organization or networks need to be encouraged or created to achieve their goals at an appropriate scale. Funds can pour into Pakistan, but it the effectiveness with which these funds are used to support the victims by which the aid and the aid-givers will be judged. As Adrian Hamilton notes in his article:
“Money promised in aid means nothing by itself. What matters is people, their livelihood and their survival. If it was just a matter of money then, frankly, I'd prefer to give it to the mosques. It's more likely to reach the victims.”

Floods in Pakistan: Vulnerability

2010-08-23T05:15:00.000-07:00

Disasters always seem to affect the most vulnerable people. Images flashed across the television screen always seem to be of the poor struggling with their few possessions to escape the onslaught of the physical events. But what is vulnerability? As you might expect it is not as simple as a single definition. Vulnerability is a complex term and only one of several that are essential to understanding how people respond and are able to respond to a hazard and a disaster (I will discuss the term more systematically in a later blog, only the bare bones of what I think is essential to this situation will be outlined here).

Vulnerability could be simply put as the potential for loss of life or property in the face of environmental hazards. The susceptibility for loss may be another useful phrase. Associated with vulnerability are other terms, often ‘borrowed’ from subjects such as ecology and used, with the various usual inappropriate translations, in geographic research. Adaptation refers to the ability of the actants in the socio-ecological system to find strategies to adapt to the hazard or disaster. Resistance is the ability of the actants to resist the impact of the hazard or disaster. Resilience is the ability of the system to absorb, self-organise, learn and adapt to the hazard or disaster. A useful resource for vulnerability can be found at the web pages of Neil Adger (http://www.uea.ac.uk/env/people/adgerwn/adger.htm) and at the Resilience Alliance website (http://www.resalliance.org/1.php) a site looking at research into resilience of socio-ecological systems and sustainability.

An important question, and a very geographic one, is at what scale can you apply these concepts? What scale is appropriate? The individual can be viewed as an important unit, but the individual usually operates within the context of a family or household, so is this a more appropriate unit for analysing vulnerability and resilience? What about larger entities such as communities and governments? As you change the unit of analysis would you expect the different units to have the same type of vulnerability, the same ability to resist or the same characteristics of resilience? Once these different spatial entities interact, such as the provision of aid by the government to individuals, does this cross scalar interaction affect vulnerability and resilience? In other words, what seems like a simple thing is very complex to unravel in detail.
Another issue is at what point it is possible to identify a vulnerable people? Before a disaster is it possible to identify characteristics at an appropriate scale of a vulnerable individual, household, community or region? During a disaster are the characteristics that define vulnerable the same or do they alter and so does who or what is vulnerable alter? Likewise after the hazard do these characteristics change again? What I hope is becoming clearer is that vulnerability, resistance and resilience vary as the hazard or disaster varies and are in a dynamic relationships with the disaster as it unfolds.

So how can this set of concepts be used to analyse the floods in Pakistan? Taking into account that I have as much sketchy and incomplete information as everyone else that relies on selective media reports and selective web for information about the floods could I suggest the following. The static aspects of vulnerability, before the disaster strikes, could be analysed by looking at access to resources and power of different parts of the population. The poor, to generalize, have little access to resources such as funds for crops, for irrigations and the like. They also have little access to political power to ensure the infrastructure serves their needs. They also have little access to resources to escape the disaster (anyone else think it’s odd that media can hire helicopters and transport into and out of disaster zones but the victims can’t?!) Identifying low income areas may provide an indication of populations likely to be unable to cope with a disaster, a sudden disruption to their daily lives. Households not integrated into a wider community may not be able to resist a disaster as well as households who are well bounded within a wider community. This property, however, may not become clear until during or after a disaster, until the community responses to the event (indeed the community may be defiendby hte disaster such as the development of a community within refugee camps).

There is also a dynamic aspect to vulnerability; the manner in which relationships are organised and the manner in which they change through normal times and then during and after a disaster. Such flows could include the transport infrastructure; a key aspect that appears to have failed during this disaster and which has dramatically affected the ability of the institution of government to maintain an effective relationship with vulnerable groups. At a local level, however, is the transport infrastructure that remains intact sufficient for the local population to move to safety and then initiate community based activities that represent resilience at that level?

But vulnerability doesn’t need to be confirmed to the lowest entity you can identify and, as you might expect, the nature of that vulnerability might change as you change your scale or entity of analysis. The Pakistani government, for example, has come in for criticism in its handling of the disaster but you could argue it is vulnerable as well. It has an inadequate infrastructure for dealing with such a wide ranging disaster (although it does beg the question does any country have an adequate infrastructure for coping with such a spatially disperse disaster). The institutions of government respond using particular procedures, mechanisms and pathways that may be vulnerable if specific aspects of the infrastructure are lost. In addition, Pakistan could be viewed as having a lack of access to appropriate resources, both financial and material, (e.g. lack of reserve funds, lack of helicopters) to respond to the disaster. The country itself could be viewed as vulnerable because of its relative developing status compared to other countries and the uneven development, and so uneven access to resources and power, within the country.

There may be no answers in the above analysis but I do hope it points out some interesting and important questions about what vulnerability may mean and how that meaning changes as the nature of the disaster unfolds and, importantly, as the resilience of different the communities emerges.

Donations for the onoging disaster can be made within the UK via the Disaster Emergency Committee, DEC, go to http://www.dec.org.uk/ or to Islamic Relief UK http://www.islamic-relief.org.uk/Donate.aspx?gclid=CNeE4KSUz6MCFYT-2AodqALklg.

Floods In Pakistan: Unfolding Humanitarian Disaster

2010-08-23T02:26:00.000-07:00

Since the Indus began to flood northern Pakistan on 29th July, a major humanitarian disaster has unfolded, documented by the world’s media (within the UK to make a donation via the Disaster Emergency Committee, DEC, go to http://www.dec.org.uk/ or to Islamic Relief UK http://www.islamic-relief.org.uk/Donate.aspx?gclid=CNeE4KSUz6MCFYT-2AodqALklg). The disaster almost seems to be in slow motion as the floodwaters have made their way the length of the river, flooding and destroying lives and livelihoods in their wake. (Ban Ki-moon described the floods as a slow-motion tsunami to emphasis the cumulative and long-term nature of the disaster, http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2010/aug/19/pakistan-flood-ban-ki-moon). Reports and analysis have ranged widely encompassing subjects as diverse as the flood hydrology of the river, the plight of people unwilling to leave their crops and livestock until the last minute (if even then), the slowness of aid provision (see comments of Louis-George Arsenault of UNICEF http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-south-asia-11054958 ), the ability of the government to respond and the exploitation of the situation by terrorists. The unfolding disaster has also highlighted, to me at least, the limitations of a blog. Trying to get across the complexity and inter-relatedness of the disaster and its development in a short, pithy few hundreds words is beyond difficult. Such a limited space can’t do justice to the disaster or its victims but rather than say nothing I will try to provide some short bursts of thoughts on different aspects of hazards analysis this disaster highlights. Importantly, this disaster has been played out in a Western media seemingly not quite sure what to make of Pakistan and its people in the light of Western visions of terrorist groups and their relationship to the Pakistani government and people, whether this relatinoship is real or imaginary.

This is the first in a series of blogs that will look at the floods from slightly different angles. The first outlines the physical basis of flood and then points out some potential human influences that may have added to the disaster, the second looks at vulnerability of people, the third discuss relief and aid. They are not meant to be comprehensive, just short perspectives on a major catastrophe.

To set the scene the following graphics, drawn from the BBC website, illustrate the extent of the problem. Figure 1 illustrates the extent of the flooded area. The classification of what ‘moderately’ and ‘severely’ affected means is not clear, but the important fact to bear in mind is the vast scale, the absolute area affected by the flood waters. The total number of deaths may appear to be undramatic at the moment (although not to the 1,600 or so who have died), but the potential for deaths and the death toll, like the disaster itself, may be slow to fully unfold. Not only are the immediate effects of inundation a problem but the breakdown of the infrastructure is a vital aspect of this disaster. The destruction of roads and other means of transport mean that the usual methods of delivering aid can not be used. The rolling, wave-like nature of the disaster is illustrated by the hydrographs within the figure. The date of the peak flow changes as you go downstream. This means that the infrastructure is progressively destroyed in the direction form which aid could come.

Figure 1 Extent of floods (source BBC website)

Figures 2 and 3, before and after the floods satellite images, illustrate the extent of the flooding once again but also highlight the relatively fertile nature of the area flooded. The desert area surrounds the green zone in the before image (Figure 2), but a large portion of this green area turns blue-green after the floods (Figure 3). This highlights the often mentioned future disaster of reduced agricultural output for the immediate future. In other words, the disaster doesn’t stop when the flood water recede; people need to somehow get back to their land (although the landlord-tenant arrangements may mean it is not actually their land but land they farm) and then try to salvage what crops and livestock they can to support them into the future. In addition to flooding, the heavy rainfall can also induced landslides which add to the problems of aid delivery as well as being a major hazard in themselves (see Dave Petley's landslide blog for updates daveslandslideblog.blogspot.com/)

Figure 2 Satellite image of before floods - 2009 (Source BBC website)

Figure 3 Satellite iamge of after floods - 2010 (Source BBC website)

This is a very simple outline of the physical basis of the disaster – unprecedented rainfall, massive floodwaters surging, albeit slowly, down the most fertile regions of Pakistan. The language makes this an unavoidable natural disaster. Several news reports have begun to ask what lessons can Pakistan learn from the floods contrasting them with past floods in Africa (forgetting the different contexts or the fact that Pakistan is still working through this disaster!)

There has been some discussion of humanly induced aspects to the flooding. Mason Inman in National Geographic News on 16th August (http://news.nationalgeographic.co.uk/news/2010/07/100716-pakistan-flood-farms-river-management-irrigation/) points out that the expansion of the British canal system, started under colonial rule, by river managers has resulted in a river system that canalized and dammed, where waters are diverted to feed the needs of agriculture. The positive aspect of this system is the improved agricultural development, the downside the lack of a ‘natural’ ability to absorb higher than engineered for flows as the ‘safety valves’ of the wetlands have been settled by and converted to farmland. An additional problem caused by canalization is the deposition of silt in the channels reducing their capacity to carry the floodwaters. The Indus is a glacially feed river and so has a relatively high silt content, this silt would have been deposited in the wetlands or move to the sea in uncanalized rivers. (Dr Daanish Mustafa of King’s College London has undertaken research in this field and his web pages are worth a visit http://www.kcl.ac.uk/schools/sspp/geography/people/acad/mustafa/ )

So are floods really the fault of the population? Was the flooding avoidable if the Pakistani people had planned more carefully. Such a question is fairly typical of the dominant approach to hazard analysis – of identifying the victims as culprits and laying blame and responsibility on their actions. To some extent this is the approach of the more recent newsreports about 'what can Pakistan learn' - as if the disaster is a test and unless you learn this time we will not be as understanding next time! A crude assessment but hopefully makes the point. At a simplistic level it sounds reasonable – an extreme natural event made worse by the actions of the people it impacts upon. Such a view misses seeing the context or understanding why people behave as they do. The same argument of ‘it’s your own fault’ could be laid at New Orleans and the failure of the flood management system – would that be acceptable? Would that be fair?

Agricultural development is vital to feed a growing population, without development of the floodplain would this have been possible? Does the diverted water actually go to the small farmers or are the irrigation schemes developed by larger more commercial farmers who have the resources to pay for dams and the like? Is the problem the floods themselves or the overall vulnerability of the population impacted by the floods? (the subject of the next blog). Do individual small farmers, the victims seen in the media, actually have any control over the canalization schemes, or the development of the floodplain; what organisation or organisations do? Do the small farmers actually own the land or is it rented with all the implications of the needed to grow cash crops to pay the rent, lack of resources to improve the land, to afford water management schemes, etc. that this implies? If the farmers do rent, then what are the implications for reconstruction policies that will help them? These questions, and many others, highlight that a sequence of economic, social and political decisions have contributed to the disaster but to say these decisions were deliberate or to use them to shift responsibility for the disaster onto the victims is simplistic in the extreme and very unfair. The small farmers, the families fleeing when all hope of saving their farms is lost, are all images of powerlessness; they are not also images of those who are responsibility. They are images of people who have been in the wrong place at the wrong time when a confluence of extreme physical events and a sequence of human events beyond their control produce a disaster. Please give generously.

BP Oil Spill and Swiss Cheese: Other Examples on Web

2010-08-02T15:11:00.000-07:00

Some times it is nice to know that your view of something is shared by others and its seems that the Swiss cheese view of the BP oil spill is one of these views (maybe one day I will think of something new under the sun!). Tim Webb in the Observer on 18th July noted the BP executives used the ‘Swiss cheese’ analogy to explain how accidents occur. MasterResource, a free-market energy blog has some comments about the Swiss cheese model. BP’s "Leading from the top in BP" powerpoint makes reference to the Swiss cheese model of accidents. These are just a few examples from a quick search of the Web - I am sure there will be a lot more out there. So the concepts in model are clearly known about. How are they actually applied in practice if they are so well known?

Pakistan Floods and Landslide Hazard

2010-08-02T04:34:00.000-07:00

The floods in Pakistan and the damage they are causing has statred to become of interest to the media. The new link to Dave Petley's Landslide Blog (Dave is the Wilson Professor in the Department of Geography at the University of Durham) links this blog to an extremely useful site that deals not only with the current floods and potential for landslides but also provides an archive of information on landslides across the globe since 2007 when Dave started his blog.

A Decade of Petroleum Company Disasters?

2010-08-01T03:15:00.000-07:00

A recent report by the National Wildlife Federation has the provocative title Assault on America: A Decade of Petroleum Company Disaster, Pollution, and Profit. (introductory page, report accesibel from this page). The report states that the recent BP oil disaster is just one of four large events over the last 33 years that have made major headlines. Behind these big events, other smaller events, monthly and daily disasters that don’t make the headlines, characterise the oil and gas industries. To quote the beginning of the report: ‘These disasters demonstrate a pattern of feeding America’s addiction to oil, leaving in their wake sacrifice zones that affect communities, local economies, and our landscape.’

The report then goes on to chronicle various incidents that have happened in the US related to oil and gas companies activities, although the report admits the list is not exhaustive. The conclusion of the report is worth a relatively long quote:

‘As the preceding litany of disasters makes clear, exploiting oil and gas resources to feed a growing appetite for energy is a dangerous business. Furthermore, petroleum companies repeatedly fail to protect people, nature of the climate. The 2010 BP oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico can and should be a wake-up call to all of us that now is the time to seriously begin reducing our dependence on dangerous fossil fuels …..’ (p.28)

The report finishes with a series of recommendations ranging from the financial such as ending corporate subsidies for fossil fuel energy development to legislature such as removal of exemptions from Clean and Safe Drinking Water Acts and passing comprehensive climate and energy legislation. Mixed in are policies to improve transport and home heating.

The report has a particular viewpoint, that nature of fragile and in such a delicate balance that it needs protection from humanity. The call for a move to a safer, cleaner source of energy is one I tend to agree with, but, and here is my problem, I am also someone who reads such reports and wants to try to understand more than is provided the headline figures, by the media friendly story. The nature that produces us, our lifestyles and resources may be fragile: a slight push and the whole system could collapse. Nature itself is also remarkably resilient, as the mass extinctions throughout geological time have demonstrated. Humanity could disappear and nature would still exist – this is not the sort of resilience I think most commentators opposed to the report might have in mind!

The report itself is more list than an analysis and this is where I would like to know more. The map of incidents, for example, provides no context. What is the population distribution? Does the number of incidents match this distribution. In other words are there more incidents where there are more people? This might be expected as more people mean more pipelines, more supply depots and the like. What about the comparison between the oil and gas industry and other industries? Is their record worse, better or the same as other industries over this period? What spatial context do these incidents take place in? Is the depot located in an industrial area, for example, so the general hazardscape is one of industrial hazard and industrial risk? Do the workers here know about the risk and accept it or assess it differently from those who wrote the report?

There are the economic and social contexts to consider as well. Is the economy of the area of the incidents dependent on oil and gas? Are the communities dependent on this industry? What are the displacement costs of the suggested policies? A healthy environment is essential for humanity but people have to work. Transition takes time during which people still need to eat. Suggesting some policies that will protect and enhance the environment are essential but alongside these there should be suggestions for smoothing the transition particularly where there is a spatial concentration of the ‘problem’ industries as this is also likely to result in a concentration of a dependent population. In other words policies need to be spatially sensitive as well as environmentally sensitive. There is also the question of the perception of the hazard. The report catalogues the incidents and by sheer weight of repetition you feel the burden of responsibility of the industry. Btu is this how the industry and, importantly, working in the industry is viewed on the ground. How people perceive hazards and how they react to that perception are crucial in understanding the risks individuals are prepared to tolerate. An environmentalist, viewing nature as fragile, may view any oil plant as an unacceptable risk. An oil worker may understand the argument of the environmentalist but may believe the risk has been overestimated or that the risk is less than the risk of their family starving if they are laid off because of environmental lobbying.

The magnitude/frequency relationship could looked at as well. The four big incidents – are they all the same magnitude (however that is being defined) and what is the gap between them? Do the smaller events follow a known distribution (linear, geometric, logarithmic or another distribution?) and if so what is the cause of this? Going back to a pervious blog about the Swiss cheese model of hazards – did the industry learn from the small events or big events? In other words is there a continual process of safety checking based on what the smaller incidents tell the industry about the holes in its protocols and practices or is it the large, headline grabbing events that produce such change (if indeed these changes happen). The hope is that the small events have value in focusing thinking about the holes, but the fear is that it is only the larger events that prompt such thinking.

BP Oil Spill: Disaster, Media Hype or Fitting a Narrative?

2010-08-01T03:06:00.000-07:00

The BP oil spill in the Gulf was an environmental disaster wasn’t it? Tony Hayward fell on his sword didn’t he (the point being nicely dulled by a pension but a gesture nonetheless)? BP have set aside billions to pay for the clean-up and for compensation haven’t they? A big commercial company wouldn’t do that if it didn’t need to surely? President Obama’s rating have plunged based on perceptions of his response. Photographs of oil covered pelicans fill the Web. But is the oil spill the eco-disaster that the images on the news and Web state?

A rethink, backlash, call it what you like is starting to emerge as exemplified by the article in Time on 29th July 2010 by Michael Grunwald (The BP Oil Spill: Has the Damage Been Exaggerated?), highlights that the oil spill disaster appears to be a lot less of a disaster than the public had been lead to believe by President Obama, by Green groups, the media and local Gulf communities. The article outlines four reasons why the spill isn’t as damaging as it was initially made out to be. Firstly, the oil from Deepwater is lighter and more degradable than usual (meaning in comparison with the Valdez oil spill). Secondly, the Gulf is warmer and, again comparing to the colder water associated with the Valdez spill in Prince William Sound, so bacteria has been able to break down the oil more rapidly. Thirdly, the flow from the Mississippi has kept oil away from the coast. Lastly, Mother Nature, apparently, is incredibly resilient.

Grundwald supports his argument with comments from a number of spill-response fund contractors, in particular a former Louisiana State University professor Ivor van Heerden who he reminds readers debunked, along with out the Paul Kemp another former LSU professor, the myths the overtopping of the levees by Katrina being due to the nature of the extreme event, as suggested Army Corps of Engineers, and the role of engineering failures in the disaster. The subsequent suggested harassment and van Heerden’s loss of post are used to imply a martyr for the truth. Kemp also highlights to the author that the oil spill is a tiny contributor to the 2,000 sq. mile loss of coastal Louisiana over the last century with the canals and pipelines of the oil and gas industry being highlighted as potential contributors. Similarly, he cites and annual rate of loss of wetlands of 15,000 acres in Louisiana, whilst only 350 acres of oiled marshes have been found by assessment teams (leave aside for a moment if the two terms are technically the same and how identification is made by assessment team – it still implies a minor impact).

So has the oil spill been hyped up, only now to be found to be a leak, as Grundwald begrudgingly credits Rush Limbaugh as foreseeing? The answer is tied up with how the spill has been represented and with the expectations this raises about how the story should unfold. Science is meant to be an objective process, a final, impartial arbitrator, yet it rarely is. Grunwald is at pains to point out the affiliations of his sources, mostly scientists working for spill-response fund contractors, suggesting he understands the funding of the source will be seen as an important issue by his readers. Why? If science is objective then whoever funds it shouldn’t matter, the facts will remain the same. Science does provide a consistent method for producing consistent and repeatable results (anyone really, deeply interested in this I refer to my textbook, Science, Philosophy and Physical Geography, insomniacs will find it very useful!) The questions asked, the type of information obtained, the theories tested and interpretation is all a matter for choice. Sometimes choice is extremely limited as one technique becomes the standard in a field of study, for other areas of science there may be a range of techniques for trying not answer the same type of questions. In a field science, which is what the ecologists, biologists and engineers are trying to practice, the complexity of the real world they are trying to study makes determining a single unequivocal interpretation extremely difficult. On top of the signature of the oil spill you have the signature of long-term changes and of site-specific impacts such as canal developments that can hide, amplify or do nothing to the impact of the oil spill. This is not the simple, clear narrative that the media or, to some extent, the public want.

The labelling of the BP oil spill as an environmental disaster resulted in an almost immediately referral back to the Valdez oil spill. The visual storyline that unfolded was graphic in its portrayal of shivering, oil soaked birds, they feathers slick with black gooe. Waves of blackness struggling to break on black shore, a stark contrast to the pristine whiteness of the mountains often just in view. Armies of volunteers crying as the corpses of wildlife were dredged from the shores of the sound. There was even a clear villain – the captain of the vessel, so an easy target for blame. In other words, the media referred back to an incident that had a clear narrative structure allied by a clear series of visual images to back up that narrative structure. The label oil spill was associated in the mind of the media and the public with those images, with that narrative.

The BP oil spill of 2010, as it is now labelled, is a different beast. The context is different. This is not an enclosed body of water; it is a large, dynamic expanse of fluid into which the oil is spilling. The dynamics of dispersal are different and so the damage may be different both spatially and through time. There are images of pathetic-looking pelicans but often recycled rather than new images. There are no images of vast expanses of oil-soaked beaches with tourists struggling bare-foot through oil-caked sand. In other words, the storyline doesn’t match the Valdez. There is no struggle of fragile nature to witness in close-up, there is no valiant struggle of volunteers with the hint of nature redeemed by humanity; there may be a villain but Tony Hayward is now exiting stage left. The visual story does not match the story of the Valdez, so the impression is the disaster is not as significant. Without the visuals that match the expected story of environmental disaster dictated by the Valdez, what narrative can the media resort to?

Mother Nature is incredibly resilient apparently. Another narrative. Evidence can be selected to support this as Grunwald does. Environmentalists would state that nature is delicately balanced and we disturb that. Another narrative and another set of evidence. The impact of the BP spill may take a lot more scientific research to pin down; it may interfere with environmental systems in unexpected ways, it may take a short time, it may take years, it may produce newsworthy pictures and stories, it may produce dry, detailed and rigorous academic papers. The psychological blow of the spill to the perception of the Gulf coast as a safe clean area is part of this impact. The spill was a disaster for those killed in the blast, it is a an ongoing environmental disaster but it is different in its nature from the seeming point of reference for the media and some of the public, the Exxon Valdez. The impact is and will be complex, but it will unfold with its story, its own spatial and temporal scales. Media-wish this may or may not fit neatly into an existing narrative. What is certain is that the media, the politicians, environmentalists, the bloke at the bar, will all take the opportunity to interpret the spill in their own way, to fit their narrative and, importantly, to fit their own political views and needs.

Phronetic Social Science is on Facebook

2010-07-29T06:15:00.000-07:00

Please note the new link to Phronetic Social Science on Facebook. This is a site run by Bent Flyvbjerg to help to promote the understanding and development of this approach in the Social Sciences. Well worth a look and a wander around the links to get a better understanding of the approach, its application and the debates surrounding it.

Hazards: The Developmental Approach

2010-07-29T05:20:00.000-07:00

Way back as an undergraduate I eagerly read Hewitt’s 1983 book ‘Interpretations of Calamity’. An edited collection of papers from a number of authors it offered a different perspective, a new angle (to me anyway) on what hazards were and how to study them. The book fits into a more general trend at this time to analyse hazards differently from the then dominant, scientific approach (with, admittedly, a cardboard caricature of science being contrasted), hence the term ‘alternative approach’ used by Hewitt.

So what is so different that the approach deserves the tag ‘alternative’? Hazards are no longer seen as sudden breaks with normality, abrupt geophysical events that are unpredictable in their occurrence and impact. Instead hazards are viewed in context. They may be physical in nature but their impact is always differentiated and there is always a human element to them. Beyond the simple ‘without people there are no hazards’ aspect, the developmental approach, as the name might suggest, focused on looking at where the impact of hazards was greatest – the developing world. The claim was and is that this is no an accident. Hazards and disasters highlight an ongoing process of underdevelopment, of lack of access to resources and to economic and political structures to empower people to respond and resist the impact of hazards. Hazards are not breaks with normality, instead they throw into sharper focus the normality of vulnerability and underdevelopment of certain sectors of the population and of the world. Some authors even suggested that such underdevelopment was an essential component of the world economic system, ensuring that certain countries never got to the level to compete with developed countries.

As you might guess, this view of hazards has an acute political angle, a key concern with development and social justice. Hazards that are ‘natural’ are no-one’s fault; hazards that are a product of an unequal society can be blamed on someone or some group. Again not surprisingly, Marxist and structuralist researchers were and are very active in this field and research has tended to focus on the poor and underprivileged in both developing and developed nations. From a Marxist beginning, the importance of social, economic and cultural factors in understanding differential vulnerability to hazards and recovery from disasters is now firmly engrained whatever the political persuasion you happen to be (at least I think so!) The approach is probably best explained through a couple of illustrations.

One of the classic illustrations of this approach is the issue of soil erosion in developing countries. In a dominant approach study you might measure physical properties such as soil fertility, slope angle, rainfall erosivity (how powerful the rainfall is so how much it can erode), soil erodibility (how susceptible the soil is to being eroded) – all terms found in the Universal Soil Loss Equation (USLE) which I will chat about in a later blog. You might then recommend that the locals change their ways to reduce environmentally harmful soil loss (conveniently forgetting that they have somehow survived for hundreds maybe thousands of years in this environment using their framing methods). You might even draw on a convenient list of crops that would bind and help prevent soil loss. This highlights a classic tactic or claim about the dominant approach. The victims become those responsible for the problem. It is the farmers fault there is erosion; it is the farmers fault he farms the land that gets flooded by the storms in Bangladesh. The developmental approach doesn’t assume this. It asks a different set of questions.

A farmer in Nepal has a difficult enough life as it is without a Western expert telling them to stop doing what has worked for generations. They have to pay rent, they have to pay for the fertilizer and farming equipment they need to use the new crops the expert told them to use and their landlord insists they grow because they mean he can put their rent up. His wife (in a very sexist caricature here) is always on about the latest things they should have that her cousin in Kathmandu has. The children need to walk to school and he needs to pay for their education if they are to escape the same trap as he. Is this painting a picture of an uncaring, deliberately environmentally destructive farmer? Or is this painting a picture of someone struggling to become part of a wider society with all the pressures, demands and aspirations that this means as illustrated in Figure 1. This is the view of the developmental approach, soil erosion isn’t a sudden problem, it is part of the system, it is an inevitable consequence of the farmer’s position within a capitalist society.

Figure 1 Web of RealtioNs Affecting the Farmer (Note scale not mentioned as yet)

A farmer is nested within a set of hierarchical relations all of which constrain how he (or she but that is fairly unlikely in this context) can behave. If the economy alone is considered then something like Figure 2 could illustrate the farmer being nested in his own farm within a local economy, which is in turn nested in a regional economy which is itself part of a global economy. The farmer is impacted by the regional economy where as a tenant he needs to pay rent to a landlord who may be absent. The landlord may be enmeshed in a regional economy where cash is vital to maintain his or her lifestyle forcing the local farmer to grow cash crops to pay the rent in cash rather than any other form such as labour or goods in lieu of cash. Instantly, this drags the farmer into the global economy. Cash crops may require different farming practices from traditional ones plus funds for seeds, fertilizer, etc. Now imagine a drought hits the area. The farmer can not response as they used to with traditional methods as now their land is growing cash crops that aren’t use to the extreme natural conditions. The farmer can’t grow enough food for his family nor to pay the landlord. What has caused the disaster? The farmer or the relatively powerless position of the farmer in the world economy?

Figure 2 Hierarchy of economic relations affetcing farmer

Adding other layers such as society (Figure 3) and some complicated interactions are bound to ensue. Institutions are regional or national level, such as the government or state religion, will impact on the day to day life of the farmer and so influence how he behaves. Equally, however, these institutions are dependent on the individuals for their existence, without people governments can’t exist, but it is accessibility to these institutions that determines whether individuals feel they have the power to alter their circumstances. Access is partly determined by money, so economics weaves into the social. I have drawn circles as global, regional and local. This is really just for convenience you could define other spatial units, such as nations, development boards or even continental organisations, and other sets of relations for these units. The important point is that there is a nested set of relations that can very soon developed into a very complicated web of relations that constrain the behaviour of an individual. In these cases placing the responsibility for a disaster at the feet of an individual seems a little harsh.

Figure 3 Combining hierarchies: Economic and social levels - note units can differ in scale and there are inter-scale linkages to consider - in other words it gets very, very complicated!

COMMUNITIES AND ENVIROMENTAL GEOGRAPHY

2010-07-26T07:06:00.000-07:00

ENVIRONMENTAL GEOGRAPHY THAT MATTERS

I outlined my initial view of environmental geography a couple of blogs ago. Since then I have been looking around for something that could clarify, expand and explain my view with a little more clarity and depth. I hope that my outline of the different approaches to studying hazards is beginning to show how environmental geography can be relevant.

I have been, however, loking for something that would serve as a reference for dicsussion; something that might need expansion and correction from time to time but one which readers of the blog might like to mull over and consider. A useful starting point might be the quote below taken from a book by Bent Flyvbjerg. I have just replaced the words ‘social science’ with the words ‘environmental geography’.

‘.. we must take up problems that matter to the local, national, and global communities in which we live, and we must do it in ways that matter; we must focus on issues of values and power like great social scientists have advocated ….. Finally, we must effectively communicate the results of our research to fellow citizens. If we do this we may successfully transform [environmental geography] from what is fast becoming a sterile academic activity, which is undertaken mostly for its own sake and in increasing isolation from a society on which it has little effect and from which it gets little appreciation. We may transform [environmental geography] to an activity done in public for the public, sometimes to clarify, sometimes to intervene, sometimes to generate new perspectives, and always to serve as eyes and ears in our ongoing efforts at understanding the present and deliberating about the future.’

(Bent Flyvbjerg, 2001, Making social science matter – why social science inquiry fails and how it can succeed again. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge. p.166.)

Bent Flyvbjerg is professor at the University of Oxford, in the Said Business School (http://www.sbs.ox.ac.uk/research/people/Pages/BentFlyvbjerg.aspx). He has lead a debate calling for a rejection of the natural science model of research in the social sciences and making social sciences more relevant to people outside science such as citizens and policy makers. He has developed the phronetic approach to social sciences, i.e. studying of social phenomena with a focus on power and values. This approach asks four specific questions:

1. Where are we going?
2. Is this development desirable?
3. Who gains and who loses, and by which mechanisms of power?
4. What, if anything, should we do about it?

(see Wikipiedia for more details: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phronetic_social_science)

Whilst Flyvbjerg focuses on a idealised model of how physical science is done culminating in a predictive model of reality that is not necessarily how mdoern science with one eye on complexity views or understands reality, he does make an interesting point that predictability as understood in the natural sciences may not be achievable in the social sciences. The application of a model with relaible equations or laws may not be that useful in trying to predict human behaviour or in answering questions of what ought to be, of what is fair, questions of value and judgement that natural science, in the view of many social scientists, has trouble with.

My own view is that the physical sciences (for want of a better term) ask important, but different types of questions of the environment than social sciences so it is not a surprise that different types of answers are produced by each type of study. What the above quote does emphasis is that study for its own sake will produce a sterile subject. Although environmental geography has not wandered down this cul-de-sac yet, it is vital that it is practised and practised in a relevant context for it to develop and to provide communities with the perspective and power to improve their circumstances. In other words environmental geography must be relevant.

So what would a relevant environmental geography look like? Could it square the circle of incorporating both natural and social science? Could it inform and empower communities? A possible example of this type of environmental geography is provided by the South Durban Environmental Alliance (http://www.sdcea.co.za/). This is a community based organization, active since 1996, (an umbrella for 14 affiliate organizations) that lobbies, reports and researches industrial incidents in the South Durban area of South Africa. It is a good example of participatory science or democratic science where communities get involved in developing, logging, collating and interpreting scientific information and knowledge. The division between ‘expert’ and ‘local’ knowledge becomes deliberately blurred. The reporting of incidents, for example, is collated and mapped http://www.sdcea.co.za/images/stories/pdfs/mapsincidentstoscale0406.pdf . A set of data reliant on local knowledge, presented in a format understandable to local people and available for local communities to lobby on the basis of ‘scientific’ information.
Geography is central to this alliance and they have produced a brochure on their use of GIS in developing this community based science. http://www.sdcea.co.za/images/stories/pdfs/gisbrochurejuly08a.pdf
http://www.sdcea.co.za/images/stories/pdfs/gisbrochurejuly08b.pdf
Although this type of community based activity may not be translatable across the globe it does illustrate how individuals can use geography to monitor, interpret and lobby for action on their local environments. Environmental geography that really matters.

ACTANTS AND ASH CLOUDS

2010-07-25T03:11:00.000-07:00

The risks raised by the ash cloud that swamped Europe in April/May 2010 could be thought of in terms of a set of actants (things, people, institutions anything entity really that has the ability to act upon and be acted upon by other entities). Relations between these actants are not fixed but change as the interactions between the actants change. Some relations and actants are harder to change, more entrenched, than others but all are capable of change even if this change is more painful to some than to others.

Figure 1 illustrates the main actants involved in the ash cloud story. The actants are presented as simple boxes but this hides a great deal of differentiation within each box. All airlines, for example, are not the same and or, initially anyway, were they response to the ash clod. Some airlines complained bitterly after a few days of grounding, others took the air in uninstrumented flights to ‘prove’ the safety of the airspace. Likewise, the government is likely to have had different factions pushing for grounding and for letting flights take place. All the actants relations end up focusing on airspace, the theatre in which the drama is played out.

Figure 1 Main actants in ash cloud drama

Importantly, none of the boxes is isolated; many of the boxes are intricately interlinked. Some of the links are relatively straight-forward. The Met Office and CAA, for example, are linked in a very formal manner. The CAA have set criteria for dust concentrations deemed safe. The Met Office provided that information based on computer modelling and data from instrumented flights. The Met Office may also provide the CAA with information on hazardous weather conditions but again the link is formal and highly structured. The link between the met Office and government is more of an economic link, the government paying for an impartial service, whilst the CAA has a regulatory link to the government in setting the legal parameters of responsibility for the airlines. Links need not be singular in nature. The airlines pay tax to the government (economic link), but also lobby on environmental issues and apply pressure when they interests are threatened.

The whole network trundles along, changing and developing as the actants interact, each trying to make the whole network function for their benefit. Each actant has a role in the network. The Met Office has a ‘scientific’ role of monitoring, the CAA a regulatory role, the airlines an economic role. This does not mean to say that each actant will not press into service different aspects of their character in pursuit of their goals, in their attempts to align the network and how it operate to their benefit. The Met Office tries to monitor the ash concentrations, measure and characterize the ash partilces and transmit this information effectively to all actants. The resultant grounding of flights, based on the CAA interpretation this information, meant the network wasn’t functioning in a manner that matched the desires of the airlines. The airlines tried to usurp the role of the Met Office by undertaking their own ‘tests’, flying unistrumented planes into the ash cloud and then transmitted this information through the network and beyond. The airlines tried to take on a role where they collected and transmitted information about the ash to parts of the network where that information could be understood in a way that benefited them. The general public could understand a plane going through an ash cloud and coming out the other side – could they understand complicated mathematically models that predicted ash concentrations? The airlines played to the general public, part of a wider network, to influence the government and CAA, part of the immediate network focused on the UK airspace.

Expanding the network out, it is relatively easy to include other actants (Figure 2). The CAA insisted that they were setting limits based on advice from VAAC and engine manufacturers. It didn’t take long before the economic relation between engine manufacturers and airlines resulted in the release of new information from the engine manufacturers as to the limits of operation in ash. Similarly, the wheel network could be expanded out to include the general public. There is however a danger with this type of analysis. You must always be aware that drawing a box around group doesn’t mean that that group is real or that that group is static. Entities evolve and are differentiated. Airlines are not all the same nor they necessarily behave in the same way to each hazard that they encounter. Likewise, the general public will not necessarily act as a mindless mass if given certain information. What this type of analysis does do is to help to clarify what entities are involved, how they are related and how they use these relationships to try to align the whole network to their benefit.

Figure 2 Expanding the network: VAAC and engine manufacturers

Hazards: Rational Choices

2010-07-25T02:53:00.000-07:00

The dominant approach to the study of hazards doesn’t mean that the action of people can’t be studied, just that a particular type of behaviour is often expected – rational behaviour. Given a set of choices, you will behave in a certain way and numbers can be put to that predictability. It may be that this behaviour will be modelled statistically, 95% of the time you will choose A, 5% of the time B, or 95% of individuals in a particular set of circumstances will choose A, only 5% will choose B. you get the idea. Assuming the behaviour of individuals is predictable given a context, means that responses can be modelled and planned for.

An earthquake hits a major urban area in the US. You don’t really want the authorities to spend time trying to second-guess what people will do, you really want them to use their experience and insights from experts to rapidly rescue people. A plane shudders to a halt during take-off and the smell of burning fills you nostrils. Aren’t you glad experiments and computer models gave engineers the answers as to how people behave in such a situation and so where to put the exits to try to get as many panicking people out as possible.

But if people are rational then why are seemingly irrational choices made everyday and everywhere? Why do farmers persist on farming on the flood plain in Bangladesh, why are houses still built on the flood plain in Britain, why do fishermen set to sea when the weather forecasts a hurricane? These decisions can still be viewed as rational. Take the fisherman and the hurricane, a classic problem in rationality used by Burton, White and Kates back in the 1970s to illustrate the behaviour of individuals in hazards.

They suggest that understanding rational behaviour may be better understood if it is represented as a series of possible choices or alternatives given a particular or expected state of nature (Figure 1). For each state of nature and alternative action available, the individual will judge the consequences of their actions and choose the most rational option. The individual has to appraise what the state of nature is, not the easiest thing to do, as well as be aware of the range of alternative actions available. Assuming that the researcher can limit this choice depending on the individual’s experience and circumstances there are still problems with the simple application of this model.

Figure 1 Hazards, choices, state of nature

The individual and even the researcher may be operating in complete ignorance of how nature operates so there is complete uncertainty. In this case Burton, White and Kates suggest that ‘expected utility’ will be the rational mode of decision making – thus giving away the debt to economics and economic reasoning that this view of individuals has (Figure 2). In this case the numbers in brackets represent the payoffs of each alternative action. Rationally, the fisherman will be expected to remain at sea and fish.

Figure 2 Rational chocies for fisherman

Where there is a known probability of an event occurring then the payoffs can be altered to reflect this as in Figure 3. Here the 40% probability of a hurricane (0.4) changes the likely payoffs of each alternative action. (For the remain, no hurricane cell, for example, the new payoff is now the probability of no hurricane or 0.6 multiplied by the old payoff of +2 which gives a new payoff of +1.2). The remain option is still the rational one but the difference between it and evacuating is now a lot less, particularly if the payoff of 0 for the remain option is considered if the fisherman is proved to the wrong and a hurricane does happen.

Figure 3 Choices based on probabilities of events and alternative actions

The fisherman may not think in terms of scientific probabilities but may apply their own experience knowledge and subjective reasoning to the problem. This may alter the payoff again as in Figure 4. In this figure the fisherman has a high expectation of a hurricane, translated to a probability of 0.9. What this is based on is open to quesiton. It may be a general view amongst fisherman that hurricanes are likely at this time of year in this place or it may be more personal - a childhood memory of a major hurricane clouds the perception of an individual. Whatever the cause of this perception it is somehow translateable as a probability. Now it is clear from the matrix in Figure 4 that evacuation is the rational option but based on the subjective probabilities. This type of decision making might not be classed as rational by some experts. If the level of regret is considered, then the fisherman might evacuate at the first hint of a hurricane rather then even consider weighing up options.

Figure 4 Choices based on subjective probabilities

Do people act like this? Do you carefully weigh up the alternatives available to you every time you have to make a decision? Do you consider all the information available to you? Who you are, where you are, what you have been through have no bearing on what decision you make? Being flooded out one year has no bearing on what you do this year? Including or even working solely with subjective probabilities as in Figure 3 may seem a way around this problem of seeming irrationality in decision making but is it really just a fudge? Subjective probabilities still implies that a number, a probability, can be assigned to every alternative and that that number is based on something (and possible even consistent through time). People are a lot more annoying than that – after a decision I am sure virtually everyone can justify having made that choice. Ask them at the time, presuming they have time in a major earthquake with masonry falling all around them as they drag their family to what they hope is safety – and that individual will not be able to tell you why they make a certain decision and not another.

Most decisions are taken with limited information acquired because the individual is who they are and in the circumstances they are. A poor resident of New Orleans has different access to information sources than a rich resident. Information is not action. Individual will interpret and then act (or not) upon information in different ways. These differences could be dependent on their background, their class, their access to resources (real or perceived), their belief systems and a whole manner of complex and interacting factors that might just be amendable to statistically modelling (e.g. people from socio-economic group A are more likely to act in way B as they have access to resources, better information, more insurance, etc) but are unlikely to tell you why a specific individual, in a specific stressed situation made a specific decision. In a disaster the specifics are vital are they as important before and after?

Icelandic Volcano: How Much Ash Is Dangerous?

2010-06-27T04:40:00.000-07:00

Figure 1 Image ash plume from the Eyjafjallajökull volcano

I hate flying. No that is not quite true: I hate the thought of crashing, of a massive heavy metal object plummeting 30-odd thousand feet to the ground with me in it. I do fly though, I have to for work and for holidays, so I may not be the person you most want to sit next to on a plane. Having just made it back from a second year field class in Malta when the Eyjafjallajökull volcano erupted ejecting ash to between 20,000 and 30,000 feet, you can imagine I watched the news with great interest.

Aside from hearing news of the second year Berlin fieldclass who had to trek across Europe to the Belgium coast to get back, my interest was caught by the debate, carried out with more than a hint of repressed anger, between the Meteorological Office, the Civil Aviation Authority, the government and airlines. The Met Office view is outlined through their press releases (http://www.metoffice.gov.uk/corporate/pressoffice/volcano.html) whilst the BBC archives provide details of the chronology and debate, at least the public aspect of it (http://search.bbc.co.uk/search?go=toolbar&uri=%2F&q=icelandic+volcano and hunt around for something of interest).

Figure 2 Map of extent of ash cloud impact. Source: Metetorlogical Office

The particular angle I was interested in, however, was how this diverse set of actors came together because of a specific geophysical event and how what was viewed as ‘safe’ changed as the travel chaos unfolded at airport across Europe. Eyjafjallajökull itself could be seen as an actor in its own right with its own spatial extent, temporal behaviour and characteristics such as size and shape of ash particles released. The other actors in the drama, the Met Office, the CAA, the government and the airlines were all entwined in a complex web of relationships that focused on the definition of what was a safe level of ash for flights.

The definition of safe level was central to everything that happened in late April and early May 2010. Having never had such a massive eruption with a set of meteorological conditions that pushed the ash plume over the major flight paths across most of Europe the organisation assigned responsibility for safety fell back on the ‘safe’ position of stating a of stating a zero tolerance level (a little ash was allowed in the standard threshold of a concentration of 200 microgrammes per cubic meter), no ash you could fly, any ash (above standard threshold) you couldn’t. Given the damage that ash plumes had caused for aircraft engines in the past this seemed a ‘safe’ position.

Figure 3 British Airways engine after a run in with a volcanic ash plume in 1982. Image: Eric Moody, British Airways

But how did the CAA know this. Advice is provided by VAAC (Volcanic Ash Advisory Centres – see http://www.ucl.ac.uk/news/news-articles/1004/10041901 for an outline of the global warning system and its history). But how do they know? There may have been 80 incidents since 1982 but the Icelandic eruption was something different because of the geophysical conditions, a continuous stream of ash and meteorological conditions that meant it affected European airspace. The other actors in the network, once the duration of the hazard became clearer, did not passively sit there and accept the CAA advice and the Met Office evidence. BA, for example, undertook a ‘test’ flight through the ash cloud and, emerging safely the other side, declared they felt there was no danger. Likewise, as travel chaos grew, the airlines questioned the evidence upon which the advice was based. The focus of their attention was the use of modelling rather than monitoring to predict ash cloud movement. Despite using such modelling techniques to predict weather patterns that airline use, the ash cloud models were heavily criticised for not matching the reality the uninstrumented ‘test’ flights of the airlines showed.

The definition of ‘safe’, a fixed thing you might think, became a subject of negotiation within the network based on the interest of each of the actors. The details of the zoning of the ash cloud can be found at http://www.metoffice.gov.uk/corporate/pressoffice/2010/volcano/forecasts.html. Black zones have 20 times the standard threshold ash concentration (concentrations of over 4,000 microgrammes per cubic metre), grey zones have concentrations between 10 and 20 times the standard threshold (concentrations of 2,000-4,000 microgrammes per cubic metre). The standard threshold of concentrations of 200 microgrammes per cubic metre was used to define the edge of red zones. Each zone had associated with a it an additional definition – red zones stated the concentration was as used in official VAAC products. To operate in grey zones airlines had to present the CAA with a safety case that included the agreement of their aircraft and engine manufacturers. Black zone were stated to be zones where the required tolerances of engine manufacturers were exceeded.

So is ‘safe’ a fixed term, something that is unaltered by circumstances, by context? The above summary would suggest not. ‘Safe’ levels of ash became a term that could be defined, redefined and negotiated between the actors. Scientific evidence, which you may think could decide the issue, was itself open to debate and discussion. In my next blog about the ash cloud I will look at this negotiation of evidence in more detail

BP Oil Spill: Disaters and Swiss cheese

2010-06-22T05:40:00.000-07:00

Source: Charlie Riedel: Associated Press

The explosion on April 20th 2010 and subsequent oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico is a major environmental disaster. Numbers can be trotted out to place it in context but the perception and reality is that this is a catastrophe for everyone; for the Gulf, for the environment, for jobs along the Gulf coast and beyond, for the US government and for BP. There are technical questions about how it occurred and serious concerns about the clean up but there are other more generic issues about risks and hazards that this major environmental disaster highlights.

The catalogue of BP ‘errors’ in procedure have been chronicled in the open in front of a congressional panel. BP are said to have cut corners in well design, cementing and drilling mud and installation of safety devices – lockdown sleeves and centralizers. The choices BP made produced a route to disaster that, although not a perfect fit match, the ‘Swiss cheese’ model. The Swiss cheese model was developed by James Reason in 2000 and is based on the idea that in any complex system the route to a disaster is prevented by a series of barriers. These barriers can be procedures, safety equipment, morals, anything that will restrict or constrain the actions of both the people involved and the natural phenomenon involved in the complex system. Reason viewed the system and randomness as being essential in a hazard being realised. With some modifications the same type of model can be applied to the oil spill and BPs catalogue of errors.

Reason's Swiss cheese mdoel of disaters

The layers of the ‘Swiss cheese’ are the barriers that are meant to prevent the disaster that unfolded, each slice is anything that prevents the trajectory of a disaster so that could be procedure, person, technical specification designed to prevent a blow out. The holes in the layers are the weak spots, the holes or gaps that allow ‘mistakes’ to be made. Individually, these mistakes may not be an issue. If the other holes aren’t in lien then the next barrier prevents the trajectory of disaster. Collectively, when all the holes are aligned, disasters occur. The layers can be thick or thin, heavy or light regulation of an industry for example, and likewise the holes can be large or small, gapping omissions from safety protocols or tiny, repetitive practices that for years haven’t been an issue because the other holes haven’t been in alignment.

The list of BP ‘errors’ or holes in each layer meant to prevent a trajectory to disaster is long and seems to be ever expanding. Depending on which reports you read the mistakes those in the table below (derived from tampby.com and businessinsider.com).

Well design and maintenance:
April 14th-15th: BP granted permit changes to speed up its over-budget drilling operation in Deepwater Horizon in addition to its existing ‘categorical exclusion’ from 2009. BP allowed to install cheaper, smaller single pipe. Double-lined pipe would offer protection from escaping gas.
Gaps in pipe segment could have released a blast of gas to the surface
Lack of O-ring seal could have let a blast of gas up the pipe
Drilling chief noticed ballooning of the well walls

Contaminated cement in capping operation (possibly):
April 20th : Contractors Halliburton trying to temporarily plug and cap well. Technicians noticed pressure rise that suggested cement not holding. One test showed a ‘very large abnormality’, another test was misread and well declared safe.

Alleged BP ‘company man’ over-rule:
Despite rising pressure process of replacing drilling mud with seawater began, a standard practice if no pressure problems. The objections of workers were over-ruled by BP ‘company man’. Rise in pressure resulted from oil and gas rising in well.

Hesitation in safety procedures?:
Technicians waited for official approval from BP before turning on blowout preventer. There was no hydraulic pressure when it was switched on. There is debate whether this equipment would have worked anyway in a deepwater well.
No evacuation of rig ordered despite abnormal test results.

Weak initial reconnaissance:
April 22nd – Remote robot sent to well head – no leak detected

No sonic testing:
BP had no plans to conduct a cement bond log test which uses sonics to identify any weaknesses in cement – source calls it a gold standard test.

Fake testing?:
An employee has indicated he saw evidence of test results on blowout preventer being faked.

BP response plan: Aside from the obvious of having a dead man as one of your specialsit, BP only had a generic response plan for the Gulf of Mexico not a specific plan for Deepwater (granted exemption). Delays in getting to survivors of the explosion and the generic plan having a worse case scenario of only 20,000 bbl are just two examples of problems with the generic plan.

Research delays:
BP spent weeks after the explosion researching how to stop the leak. No research in place on how to stop leak at this depth.

So what does this evolving list of errors actually tell us?

If you divide the items above into pre-event, event (simplistically mapped out below) and post-event and apply this to the Swiss cheese model, then it is clear that there were systemic holes in BP’s supposed barriers to such a disaster before the first well was even drilled. On the day of the explosion, further holes emerged in barriers, the safety procedures, that were meant to be in place and finally after the explosion the generic nature of the response plan was exposed as inadequate, more holes appeared as events unfolded. This is just one set of ‘mistakes’, other Swiss cheese figures could be constructed to illustrate others and added to as more information becomes available about the disaster.

PRE-EVENT

EVENT

What the Swiss cheese model can’t tell you is why the holes appeared in the layers and why layers thinned. Greed has been put forward as a motive by newspapers, Gulf residents and politicians. Other oil companies have testified to Congress that they would not have made the same key decisions as BP. So is it that simple? A greedy company cut corners to keep costs low and endanger the environment? Although there may prove to be an large dose of truth as the lax protocols and potential company over-ruling of workers is assessed in this another set of questions also need to be asked. Why was BP allowed the exemptions and exclusions? Why were protocols not followed? Why was testing not carried out? These seem to be some of the obvious questions and ones specific to this incident.

It may be as useful to look at the context of the drilling as much as the detail. BP were undertaking deepwater drilling, a relatively new venture for oil companies. How much of the protocols and systemic behaviour was based on BP’s experience on shallow drilling and the latitude in safety measures and well maintenance that that experience implied? If BP’s past experience was the basis for their practices in the Gulf of Mexico then it would appear that the past, the different drilling context, may not be a useful guide to the dangers of the present novel drilling operations. In other words, in this new context is knowing the way the system operated in the past, where the holes in the layers were, how thick the layers were, sufficient to ensure that drilling is safe. How have other oil companies translated and interpreted, improved safety protocols, well designs and a myriad of other parameters to take account of the new dirlling context? Often without a disastrous event, the assumptions of operating in a new context are not questions. Maybe BP’s legacy will be a review by all, compmaies, government adminsitrations and safety officials of the new holes in the cheese in this new context.

Environmental Geography - why?

2010-06-22T05:39:00.000-07:00

This blog will, I hope, help people to understand what Environmental geography is and why it is an important way of looking at the world.

I am a Principal Lecturer in Geography at the University of Portsmouth and in 2009 I, with my colleagues, started an undergraduate degree course in BSc and BA in Environmental Geography. Three of us, myself, Brian Baily and Julia Brown, researched the market and felt that what we believed to be the important aspects of environmental geography were not being taught in other courses of the same name (or if they were it wasn’t immediately clear from course outlines). We feel that environmental geography should encompass both physical and human geography and act as a means of integrating and melding the two substantive fields of traditional geography. I could go on about how environmental geography provides an interface, a means of bridging the arts and sciences, but really this view of geography has been a key focus of the geography since it developed as a university level subject back in the 1887 with Halford Mackinder at Oxford (date of his ‘On the scope and methods of geography’ paper delivered at the Royal Geographical Society, RGS. He was appointed Reader in Geography at Oxford within six months of this paper).

Aside from the academic pursuit of the subject, we feel that taking an informed ‘environmental’ perspective on the various issues and problems confronting people on a global and local basis can help in understanding the context of these problems, how they are themselves constructed and, dare we believe, even provide possible solutions to these issues. The last suggestion may be a forlorn hope but at least if you appreciate why an issue is so complex it may help in trying to understand how different interests have such difficulty trying to solve a problem. All three of us have a particular view or stance on environmental issues; we are not politically neutral and would be wary of any one who claims otherwise. This does not mean, however, that we do not try to comprehend why others approach, understand or even identify environmental issues differently from ourselves – this is all part of environmental geography.

We feel that it is important to understand both the physical and human processes that underlie environmental geography, that drive environmental change and stability but it is not enough just to understand each part in isolation. The two must be brought together and the difficulties and complexities of that assimilation of different knowledges recognised. Above all understanding the environment is as much about politics as it is about science – a key element we felt was not explicitly developed or at the forefront in the course outlines we saw. You can collect all the data about climate change that you want, you can validate the science but if no-one acts upon it then ‘scientific objectivity’ means very little. Understanding how different systems of knowledge merge and interact is a key feature of understanding the production of environmental geography.

The blog will cover a whole range of topics and I hope to upload new content on a fairly regular basis – once a week at least – or two if work interferes! I will divide the blog, initially at least, into History of Environmental Thought, Monitoring the Environment, Environmental Hazards, Environment and Society, Environmental News. I do not, however want to be too rigid in how the blog develops – feedback is welcome and essential for me to gauge if there is anyone out there reading this and, if so, what really interests them.

This blog will, I hope, build up into a useful resource for students undertaking geography GCSE, A level and undergraduates as well as informing anyone who is interested in environmental issues in general. The geographic perspective may provide something new to your thinking or it may not, but at least I hope it is useful.

Environmental Disasters

2010-06-22T05:33:00.000-07:00

We remember disasters. Pictures stream across our television screen, graphic images of the misery of death and the chaos of destruction. Hundreds, even thousands of people die, their agony captured and rerun in digital formats across the Web. Scientists tell us what happened and why, politicians bemoan the lack of warning and the poor die. Boxing Day 2004, Katrina 2005, Haiti 2010 – just dates and places but there is an immediate recognition of what they refer to.

How can we study these events and, importantly how can we understand and prevent them? This is a set of questions that has long been a staple part of academic study and it has a distinctly geographical dimension. There are three main approaches to trying to understand hazards and disasters: the dominant, the developmental and the complex. They could be seen chronologically, with the last being more sophisticated than the first or they could just be seen as different ways of looking at the same thing. A key thing to bear in mind is that there is usually a distinction between a hazard and a disaster. A hazard is the potential or possibility for damage or harm; the vulnerability for a loss. Disaster in contrast is the realisation of that potential.

The Boxing Day tsunami of 2004 and the Haitian earthquake of 2010 were destructive by any measure you care to use. Death tolls of over 200,000 almost outstrip comprehension. Whole cities levelled, communities ripped apart, national economics shattered. How could we study such events? The dominant approach (or behavioural paradigm according to Smith and Petley, 2009) takes what many would call as a very rational, scientific view of a disaster. A disaster is the result of an extreme geophysical event. The geophysical causes the problem and it is often seen as a matter of luck or not if people are harmed. Studying how people behave before and during a disaster, understanding their rational decision making and where they are irrational is the basis for developing management tools for organising populations. Civil authorities tend to view such events as distinct and discrete breaks with normality; times of crisis for which special plans, actions and laws (or lack of liberties) are needed.

In addition, understanding detailed scientific analysis of the geophysical processes that produce extreme geophysical events provides the information for attempting to predict the location and timing of such events. Of course such detailed study requires extensive and often expensive monitoring systems as well as well integrated early warning systems and a civil authority able to rationally plan for what to do with a population once the sirens sound. Such an approach could be called a ‘technological fix’ approach to disasters. Leave it to the experts and everyone might be saved.

How does this view play out in reality? Let’s take FEMA’s webpages on the National Earthqauke Reduction Programme (NEHRP) as an example (www.fema.gov/plan/prevent/earthquake/nehrp.shtm or www.nerhp.gov for the NEHRP webpages). The opening statement highlights the dominance of the dominant view of disasters.

‘The National Earthquake Hazards Reduction Program (NEHRP) seeks to mitigate earthquake losses in the United States through both basic and directed research and implementation activities in the fields of earthquake science and engineering.’
Reading the Strategic Plan for the National Earthquakes Hazards Reduction Programme (Fiscal Years 2009-2013) (http://www.nehrp.gov/pdf/strategic_plan_2008.pdf) there are three key goals –

A: Improve understanding of earthquake processes and impacts;
B: Develop cost-effective measures to reduce earthquake impacts on individuals, the built environment, and society-at-large;
C: Improve the earthquake resilience of communities nationwide.

Within these goals there are a number of objectives but each can be seen to be using language associated with the dominant paradigm. For goal A, for example, objective 1 is ‘advance understanding of earthquake phenomena and generation processes’, basically do fundamental science into the geophysical phenomenon. Even when people and society are considered as in objective 3, it is viewing actions as being amendable to study using similar rational methods as those used for the geophysical phenomenon. Likewise for goal B, the objectives talk about developing tools for assessing loss and risk, implying that everything can be allocated a number, a quantity for comparison. Even goal C is couched in these terms. Objectives 11 and 12, for example, seek to promote or support the implementation of public and private standards in building codes and policies, whilst objective 10 focuses on developing more comprehensive risk scenarios for planning actions, presumably at an appropriate organisational level.

Seeing disasters as driven by the geophysical event, as crisis that need crisis management responses and as understandable via scientific analysis and usually via quantification of impacts is not necessarily wrong. It is vital to know what the geophysical event is and how it varies. It is vital to understand how buildings behave in earthquakes and build accordingly. But are people simply rational entities that will be told what to do by authorities? Is it simply a case of knowing more and telling everyone – will this reduce disasters?

In my next blog will explain how people’s behaviour has been studied and how rational decision making is incorporated into this dominant paradigm.

Environmental Geography -the key questions

2010-06-22T05:20:00.000-07:00

Geography is often said to supply the ‘where’ bit of the set of questions ‘how, what, where and why?’ This blog views geography much as another environmental geography blogger does (http://environmentalgeography.blogspot.com/). In this blog geography asks the questions – where is it, why there and so what? This blog adds a bit more. Geography asks what is it, where is it and why there and not somewhere else and then so what? Geography looks at both the static questions of what and where as well as the more dynamic questions about why and so what. By combining these, the static and the dynamic, you get an understanding of not only what is going on but also why.

OK so in English what does that mean? Take a pollution incident. The first question is what is it? What is the pollutant? The next question is where is it? Which bit of the environment is it in and is that important? A release of sulphur dioxide from coal fires would produce a stream of gas in an urban area. Where it is important as the sulphur dioxide could affect human health if concentrations rose high enough. Likewise if a specific meteorological condition occurred, such as a blocking high pressure system, then smoke and sulphur dioxide could remain in the urban area and concentrations build up to such an extent that some people have difficulty breathing whilst others collapse and die. This is not a random example as Londoner over 60 would know. The Great Smog or Big Smoke of Friday 5th to Tuesday 9th December 1952 was the result of the interaction and coincidence of large releases of smoke and sulphur dioxide from low quality coal from power stations and domestic fires and the presence of an anticyclone over London from 4th December. The resulting temperature inversion over London effectively trapped the pollution.

Figure 1: Nelson's coloumn nearly hidden in the Great Smog

The last question is why there and not somewhere else. Pollution wasn’t uncommon in 1950s London. Low quality coal, cheap fuel in post-war Britian, had been used before; power stations were not new inventions. Likewise, anticyclones are not an unusually weather phenomenon. So the question is why there and why then? The preceding days had been cold; more coal was being burnt than usual. Diesel fumes added to the usual mix as relatively new buses took over from the recently defunct tram system. Mix in the pollution from industrial Europe that had blown across the Channel in the days before and the amount of pollution was higher than usual and not a breathe of wind to disturb the stillness of the brown shroud of pollution and all the elements come together to explain the why.

Figure 2: Carrying on inthe Great Smog

The why doesn’t necessarily stop there. You could ask why was cheap coal needed? Why was the tram network removed? Why didn’t authorities predict the dramatic health problems the smog would produce – an estimated 12,000 people in the following weeks and months, mostly young, old and people with pre-exiting respiratory problems?

Figure 3: Deaths due to the Great Smog (source for image -Wikipedia)

You could also then explore the so what question. What was the significance of the Great Smog – in other words does it matter? At a micro scale every life lost dramatically answers the so what question. The individuals are not just numbers but people who had families, jobs an existence beyond the point they became in a historic graph. At a national scale, the so what is answered by the Clean Air Acts of 1956 and 1958, a direct outcome of the havoc caused by this pollution incident.