Risk and Heuristics

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.

Floods in Pakistan: Why is aid so slow?

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

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.