In a recent seminar with young researchers at CEI, Professor Rajib Shaw, a distinguished scholar with decades of experience working across Asia, from earthquake-prone Japan to climate-vulnerable Vietnam, shared transformative perspectives on disaster management. His insights challenge conventional thinking and highlight the critical intersection of environmental change, human vulnerability, and community resilience.

Reconceptualizing Disaster: Hazard Meets Vulnerability

Professor Shaw begins with a fundamental distinction: a disaster occurs not simply when a hazard exists, but when that hazard negatively impacts human lives. He defines disaster as comprising two essential components: the hazard itself and the vulnerability dimension (disaster risk).

While hazards can strike at any time, what has become increasingly severe is human vulnerability. The troubling reality is that more people are living in “danger zones”: mountainous regions susceptible to landslides, coastal areas exposed to typhoons and storm surges, and flood-prone valleys.

There are multiple reasons behind this growing number of people living in hazardous areas, which means more individuals face the risk of suffering from disasters. First, many residents have lived in these localities for generations, settled on ancestral lands and continuing to remain despite harsh conditions. Second, others have migrated to these areas for various reasons: economic opportunities, displacement, or lack of alternatives.

In some cases, these areas harbored hazards from the beginning, but were not classified as disasters because no permanent residents lived there. When people migrate to these harsh environments, these hazards transform into disasters. Professor Shaw illustrates this with a compelling example from the Himalayas. The mountain range experiences earthquakes almost daily due to its location at a tectonic plate boundary. Yet these earthquakes aren’t classified as disasters because few people inhabit those high-altitude areas. Only when earthquakes affect populated regions and the built environment do they become disasters. This reveals a crucial truth: natural hazards transform into disasters because of human development patterns and choices.

Another scenario involves areas that were not originally dangerous, where communities have lived for generations. However, due to human impact and climate change, new hazards emerge that affect these long-established residents, and this constitutes a disaster. “Earlier, you know, we used to call it a natural disaster. But now we say that disasters are not natural,” Professor Shaw remarks, emphasizing that the human element is integral to transforming hazards into disasters.

 

Disasters Are Not “Natural”

The assertion that disasters are not “natural” rests on two fundamental premises. First, human activities directly degrade the environment and increase the frequency and intensity of hazards. People create the very conditions that endanger them, and when these hazards impact human populations, they become disasters. Second, current human capacity, whether in governance, infrastructure, or technical preparedness, remains inadequate to effectively respond to these hazards, resulting in preventable suffering and extensive losses across multiple dimensions.

A Study Case of Human Environmental Degradation Creates and Amplifies Hazards

Vietnam’s Northern region provides compelling evidence of how human-induced environmental change transforms weather patterns into catastrophic events. In recent years, the country has witnessed increasingly devastating typhoons, severe flooding, and landslides, even in areas that rarely or never previously experienced such disasters. The 2025 historic flooding across Northern Vietnam exemplifies this trend, demonstrating how anthropogenic climate change is intensifying extreme weather patterns and placing communities at unprecedented levels of risk.

Beyond climate change’s broad effects, localized human environmental destruction further demonstrates how disasters are manufactured rather than natural. While heavy rainfall serves as the immediate trigger for landslides and flooding in this region, the deeper underlying cause traces back to decades of human-induced deforestation. Forest loss has fundamentally altered the landscape’s hydrological capacity. By reducing watershed vegetation coverage, deforestation diminishes the natural ability to absorb and slow floodwaters. The result is accelerated downstream movement and amplified destructive force, transforming what might have been manageable rainfall into catastrophic flooding and landslides.

The consequences are severe and measurable. According to the Ministry of Agriculture and Environment, landslides and flash floods in the Central and Northern mountainous regions have escalated in frequency, scale, and severity in recent years. From 2020 to 2025, catastrophic events claimed hundreds of lives, particularly the flash floods following Typhoon Yagi in 2024.

The deforestation paradox reveals the complexity of human-caused vulnerability. Paradoxically, while overall forest coverage has increased in recent years and bare hills have decreased, Vietnam continues to suffer from severe flooding and landslides. This apparent contradiction exposes a critical distinction: the problem lies not in forest area statistics alone, but in the quality and functionality of protection forests.

Newly planted forests often lack the structural complexity, biodiversity, and deep root systems necessary for adequate protective capacity. These young, homogeneous plantations cannot replicate the ecological services of mature, biodiverse forests. Meanwhile, many natural protection forests have been illegally logged or unsustainably exploited, disrupting their ecological architecture and severely diminishing their protective functions. The result is a landscape that appears green in official statistics but lacks the ecological resilience to buffer against extreme weather events. When heavy rains arrive, these degraded forests fail to perform their critical protective role, and communities downstream pay the price.

This creates a vicious cycle: human deforestation weakens natural defenses → extreme weather (itself intensified by climate change) triggers landslides and floods → communities suffer disasters → the same communities often depend on continued forest exploitation for livelihoods, perpetuating the cycle. The hazards may appear natural, but their conversion into disasters is unmistakably human-made.

The Limits of Control and the Weight of Responsibility

This underscores Professor Shaw’s central message: disasters emerge not from natural forces alone, but from human choices. We cannot control nature, and there are natural fluctuations and disasters we cannot predict or prevent. However, the increasing frequency and severity of disasters cannot be attributed to natural variability alone, human actions play a significant role.

Beyond large-scale environmental destruction and climate change, individual choices and collective behaviors also bear responsibility. Through our daily decisions, where we choose to settle, how we use land, whether we protect or exploit natural resources, we are actively placing ourselves in harm’s way. The transformation of hazards into disasters is not simply something that happens to us, it is, in part, something we do to ourselves. Recognizing this uncomfortable truth is the first step toward building genuine resilience and reducing our vulnerability in an era of environmental change.

 

Conclusion

The path forward requires a fundamental shift in perspective. We must move beyond viewing disasters as inevitable acts of nature and instead recognize them as consequences of our collective choices, about where we build, how we use land, and whether we protect or exploit natural resources.

Professor Rajib Shaw’s insights remind us that while we cannot control the forces of nature, we hold considerable power over our vulnerability to them. This recognition is ultimately empowering: if human decisions have amplified our risk, then different decisions can reduce it. Meaningful change demands action at every level, from government enforcement of environmental protections to community support for sustainable livelihoods to individual acknowledgment of how our daily choices contribute to collective vulnerability.

In a rapidly changing climate, the most dangerous vulnerability may be our continued reluctance to accept responsibility for the disasters we help create. Only by confronting this truth can we begin building genuine resilience, not through technological fixes alone, but through fundamental changes in how we relate to the environment that sustains us.

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References

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