23  Disaster risk and vulnerability reduction

Ben Wisner

Introduction

The central focus of this book is global environmental change and human security, with an emphasis on the kinds of transformations (political, economic, cultural and technological) that are required to create human security. The focus of this chapter is on disaster risk and efforts to reduce people’s vulnerability to natural hazards that are ever more complicated by environmental changes. Few dispute the salience of such changes, especially when it comes to extreme climate events and their human consequences (IPCC, 2012). Yet to understand risk and vulnerability, it is necessary to think more broadly and consider other global changes, including how these changes interact in dynamic and differentiated local contexts. Such an approach challenges dominant climate change policies, revealing the potential and need for deeper and more transformative actions.

This chapter first discusses some key concepts and processes associated with disaster risk and vulnerability reduction, including capacities, knowledge and skills, and participation. A case study in Northern Tanzania illustrates how these concepts can be differentially interpreted to understand the local context of risk.¹

Next, the chapter uses a systems approach to consider the types of transformations that may be necessary to reduce risk. The final section considers the implications, and proposes an agenda for research, policy and civil society action.

Framing disaster risk: key concepts and processes

Vulnerability

“The focus on vulnerability emphasizes that disaster and crisis are never purely the result of natural processes but are in fact often social products,” state Heinrichs et al. (2011: 10), who continue, “It essentially refutes ‘taken-for-granted beliefs about the essential nature of things’…” (Demeritt, 2002). As White stated more than 60 years ago: “Floods are ‘acts of God’, but flood losses are largely acts of man [sic]” (White, 1945: 2). What has to be recognized is that “acts of man” are not only affecting loses; people may indeed also affect the flood itself through land use changes and engineering, and potentially also through climate change. Now in the grip of anthropogenic climate change, White’s “God” is getting a good deal of help from humanity! What, then, is vulnerability in this context?

Development studies specialist, Robert Chambers introduced the term “vulnerability” into the analysis of rural poverty in his 1983 book, Rural Development: Putting the Last First. It came as one of five elements that interlocked with each other, producing what he termed “ratchet effect” or “deprivation trap” (Chambers, 1983: 112): a condition of “integrated rural poverty” that is very difficult to extract oneself from. The other elements were political powerlessness, physical weakness (ill health), isolation, and income poverty. Contemporary users of the term “vulnerability” in the literature of disaster risk reduction as well as climate change might find Chamber’s usage odd. Isn’t vulnerability precisely a matter of what Blaikie and Brookfield (1987) called “ecological, economic, and political marginality” or what Wisner (1978) termed “eco-demographic marginality”?

It seems from the context that Chambers had in mind social vulnerability when he used the single noun. This has to do with the degree to which one’s social status (culturally and socially constructed in terms of roles, responsibilities, rights, expectations concerning behavior) influences differential impact by extreme natural events and the chances or recovery. Thus, depending on the society and situation, social characteristics such as gender, age, occupation (in caste systems), marital status, race, ethnicity, religion may have a bearing on potential loss, injury, life chances in the face of hazards and the nature of one’s recovery trajectory. In addition to such socially differentiated vulnerability, there is what I have elsewhere called “generalized vulnerability” (Wisner, 2003). Generalized vulnerability is a characteristic of the poorest of the poor in every society, especially those who not only suffer income poverty and are also politically marginal, spatially marginal (in urban squatter settlements or in remote rural locations), ecologically marginal (livelihoods based on access to meager natural resources or living in degraded environments), and economically marginal (poor access to markets) (Wisner, 1993).

A further important aspect of what I am calling generalized vulnerability is the difficulty households in this situation encounter in recovering from any insult or stress. Again, depending on the specific nature of the stress (flood, spontaneous collapse of an old apartment building, coastal storm, urban arson, or wildfire), it is much more difficult for these households to regenerate their livelihoods and shelter than for the non-poor and non-marginal (in the broad sense of “marginal” that includes political, spatial, ecological, and economic dimensions). The millionaire who lost a USD10 million home in the mountains outside Los Angeles has suffered a greater economic loss than the Mexican migrant farm worker who lost a mobile home. However, without insurance, with few financial reserves, with their extended family living across the border in Mexico perhaps a thousand miles away, afraid of applying for government aid because they are illegal immigrants, the farm worker household will have a much harder time recovering.

The poorest and marginal groups in a society live with chronic indebtedness, malnutrition, ill health, degraded physical surroundings, and often violence. For them any additional stress can have catastrophic results (losing land or meager assets to money lenders, losing children to famine, losing their place in a community as they are forced by circumstances to migrate). In this sense, whatever is on the local geographic menu could have that impact on them – flood somewhere, landslide elsewhere, coastal storm or earthquake in yet other places. If it is possible to identify the poor and the marginal, their numbers and location are a starting point, crude as it might be. Without falling into the trap of assuming that poverty equals vulnerability, one can then zero in on these groups, determining, for example, their initial wellbeing, degree of self-protection, degree of social protection they enjoy, their livelihood resilience, and the existence and extent of social capital accessible to them (Maskrey et al., 1997; Cannon, 2000).

There is ample evidence that in many disasters the elderly, young children, women, people living with disabilities, ethnic minorities, and immigrants (especially illegals) tend to suffer more (Gaillard, 2012). Women died at a higher rate than men in the Asian tsunami (Doocy et al., 2007; Fordham, 2012). Three times as many women died in the Pakistan earthquake in 2005 because they were more likely to be indoors when it hit (Reuters, 2009). The majority of the deaths from Kobe’s 1994 earthquake were in the group over 60 years of age (Wisner et al., 2004; Ngo, 2012). It is important as a minimum starting point to recognize this evidence and ensure that the needs of “high risk” groups are planned for. However, emphasizing only needs and not what various individuals or groups can bring to the task of risk reduction represents a limited way of looking at vulnerability. This view emphasizes victimhood rather than capacities.

Capacities

Capacity is a critical component of risk. Most people, even poor people, have capacities (resources, networks, knowledge and skills) that they can put to work in order to prevent, resist, cope with and recover from stresses and shocks such as an extreme natural event (Adger, 2006). Capacity is not the opposite of vulnerability. Someone may have capacities in the form of knowledge and skill but nevertheless have them blocked and thus remain highly vulnerable. Sen (1999) has discussed at length how socio-economic and political systems affect the attainment and use of capabilities. One sub-set of such capabilities is the capacities to cope and to recover from shocks. Clark (2005) provides an overview of Sen’s contribution, which considers:

Capacity to protect oneself, one’s family, and assets from extreme events as well as to recover from any damage or loss inflicted by such an event is dependent on access to resources (Wisner et al., 2004: Chapter 4). “Resources” are defined in a broad way in this context to include all bundles of assets that can produce a livelihood, as well as the institutional, political, and social pre-conditions for using those assets. Thus, for example, land and water are assets farmers can use to grow food, but there have to be conventional rules for governing the farmer’s access to the land, or, as in many countries, formal legal title to the land. Markets for buying and selling assets, goods, and services are also usually necessary for a household (rural or urban) to realize values that provide a livelihood. Income is often taken as a short cut to identifying “poor” and “less poor” households; yet income is only part of many livelihood systems. Production for own consumption remains important in many parts of the world. Also, many income sources are not usually counted. This is the case with much remittance from family members working abroad or in another part of the country. It is certainly the case where the so-called parallel economy is concerned.

Groups of people – neighbors, extended family members, members of faith communities and other civil society organizations – can be very active in their own interests when facing the possibility or reality of an extreme natural event. Little of this knowledge, skill, sharing of knowledge and material goods, mutual aid, emotional support is visible to government planners and most researchers, and much less is valued in economic terms. Yet the complex interactions among these so-called capitals (social, human, institutional, natural) may have critically positive outcomes for preventing disasters triggered by extreme natural events or at least mitigating the loss they cause, for preparing for such events, for warning and immediate relief. It is well known in disaster relief circles that the vast majority of people rescued during short onset, acute disasters (e.g. earthquakes, landslides, flash floods) are saved by non-professionals: loved ones, neighbors, and passers-by. The complex of social capital and knowledge (human capital) is also critical in the longer-term recovery period, where their interactions with the state’s institutional capital may be positive or lead to negative outcomes. In strictly economic terms under most circumstances, investments in strengthening and preserving social capital and in human capital (e.g. education and health care) provide a “twofor” or win-win situation. These investments are likely to increase productivity in normal situations and provide for more resilience at the local level in cases of extreme natural events. Where the locality and local livelihood systems are more resilient, the state is relieved of costly increments of relief and recovery expense.

Knowledge and skills

Local knowledge is important for disaster risk reduction because it is the lens through which people perceive and understand the world and work on the world. All innovation including risk reduction will have to be carried out at the end of the day by people in places. But apart from this sociological and geographical reality, there is even a more important reason why local knowledge is critical: People are constantly coping with threats. They share knowledge with neighbors, may draw knowledge in from far away, boil it down and work out ways to apply it locally. Local communities are workshops of knowledge production, not just museums of tradition. Thus for the outside specialist, the village, hamlet, town and city neighborhood are as much sources of new ideas to be tested, refined, and shared as is the outside specialist’s skill a resource for local people. There is a broad and deep potential for partnership in knowledge production for reducing disaster risk that is very seldom actually achieved.

Local knowledge comprises the totality of perceptions, beliefs, understandings, and skills that one or more members of a community uses or potentially uses to communicate about and manipulate the world. “World” in this sense is made up of the physical and built environment and also the social, economic and political environment that affect production and consumption at the local scale. This is a formal definition for the sake of clarity. In simpler terms, it is what people living in an urban or rural locality know that is useful to them in their lives. There are many important features of local knowledge that are critical to disaster risk reduction (UNISDR, 2009; 2011). First, local knowledge, like all knowledge, is social. Just as there can be no private language that only one person understands, there can be no knowledge completely separate from what others know and have known in the past. Local knowledge is not entirely “traditional” (passed on by generations). In fact, the notion of “indigenous” or “traditional” knowledge is quite limited and only part of the picture. Local knowledge is more, as it may opportunistically incorporate versions of outside specialist knowledge. For instance, weather or climate forecasts listened to on the radio may be interpreted and modified according to local weather signs and past experience. In fact, the tendency to mix or hybridize knowledges is increasing. Mobility is important to livelihoods, and family members that travel to seek wage employment or trade often send or bring knowledge home as well as money and goods.

Within a community, local knowledge is not uniformly distributed. Not everyone has access to secret knowledge or knowledge associated with local skills such as building, finding water, or midwifery. Occupations and special skills come with sub-sets of local knowledge that may not be widely distributed in a locality. Local knowledge may be a source of power and status. For example, in Sierra Leone, rice farmers have been known to compete with each other in breeding new varieties of rice, some simply for the beauty of plant. This is a source of praise and prestige. Local knowledge may not be explicitly spoken about by those who have it. It is sometimes tacit or implicit in their practices and acts – for instance, where on a slope with different soil characteristics to plant different plants. Western trained or oriented experts find the idea that knowledge is tacit hard to accept, yet it can be made explicit through patient discussion.

Local knowledge is also gendered and age graded, and moreover it varies according to the standpoints of people in different (and to some extent dynamic and changeable) life situations: for example, local knowledge of people living with disabilities, knowledge of people with chronic health problems, or knowledge of people who constitute an ethnic or caste minority in a community. Local knowledge may not appear to Western trained or oriented specialists to have any physical or biological basis or efficacy. This is because local knowledge often bridges physical and social functions and realities. Thus some women in Africa boil stones during a hunger period. “But stones have no nutritional value,” the outside observer would object. However, by executing this practice, the women signal a stage at which the community must consider the hunger serious and activate coping measures. The community is also reassured by the ritual which reminds them that they have survived in the past and that control and unity are still possible (Richards, 2009).

In the context of disaster risk reduction, the following insights on knowledge management are significant (Wisner, 2009; cf. Mercer, 2012). First, top-down diffusion of knowledge and practice requires fine tuning to local conditions. Diffusion “by the book” seldom works. Second, at the local scale, people experience threats in a more holistic way, whereas specialists who design practices tend to focused on one hazard or another in isolation from other stressors. Poverty, violence, climate change, and many different natural and other hazards confront people at the scale of 1:1 where they live, work, raise children, celebrate, and suffer. Local efforts to deal with one of these challenges generally involve dealing with the others. Fine tuning takes such experience into account. Finally, there is sometimes a lack of trust between communities and governments or outside/non-local institutions. Trust and partnership must be built; it cannot be assumed. Without trust and mutual respect, the exchange of knowledges and production of a useful hybrid of outside and local knowledge is not possible.

Participation

It is precisely at the local scale that people’s own knowledge and capacity can most usefully combine with the outreach of local government (GNDR, 2009; 2011). Over the last decade many NGOs as well as many of the national societies comprising the International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent (IFRC) have pioneered participatory action research methods through which communities map local hazards, assess the vulnerabilities they face and capacities they possess (Haghebaert et al., 2008). “Participation” can have many meanings. The so-called “ladder of participation” (Arnstein, 1969; Hart, 1992) includes everything from hosting a meeting for the local official and rubber stamping some proposal or scheme she or he brings along, to local definition of goals, capacities, and needs, and concrete steps by local people to brings these to fruition. These extremes have also been referred to as “weak” or instrumental and “strong” or transformative participation (Wisner, 1988). “Participation” as used commonly by development studies and natural hazards research in such phrases as “participatory action research” and “community participation” is a special case of “inclusion.” Büscher and Mascareño (2012) say the term “inclusion”:

Participation is where the untapped potential of faith communities becomes apparent. Religious institutions have the potential of joining with secular civil society in developing local risk awareness and self-assessment of hazards, vulnerabilities and capacities (Anderson and Woodrow, 1989; Wisner et al., 2004). Yet to move from assessment to action only some things can be done in isolation in a village, hamlet or urban neighborhood. More often than not, cooperation with local authorities is needed. This is where trust and development of a common language of risk reduction is required, but the state often demands and enforces control (Scott, 1998) rather than opt for partnerships based on trust (Wisner and Uitto, 2009).

Global change in a local context: insights from Tanzania

Understanding how capacity, local knowledge and participation interact with planning processes to produce or reduce risk and vulnerability calls for a reality check (Wisner et al. 2012a). Many processes interact with environmental change to produce diverse outcomes for human security (see Smucker and Wisner, 2008). Working with farmers, herders, local officials and other outside specialists, recent field work carried out for a study on local knowledge and climate change adaptation in northern Tanzania challenges the undifferentiated view of Tanzanian rural society that seems to inform most climate policies.

Small farmers in our Tanzanian study area have been experiencing major changes of many sorts over the past few decades, and climate change is just one of them. Scale is a critical issue. Global climate change manifests differently at regional, sub-regional and local scale. Is there less water in the Ruvu River because there is less snow melt on Mt. Kilimanjaro? Or is it because water users are extracting more upstream? Does it matter locally, at the scale of the village of Mtakuja, where those Maasai households and other people in the village may well be tapping a huge aquifer as yet unmeasured and unmapped?

Consider this example: Maasai pastoralists on the so-called Maasai Steppe (Simanjiro District) narrate increasingly poor and erratic rainfall. The most palatable of grasses for cattle are scarce. Young Maasai men must take herds farther and farther to find grass and water. Across the Ruvu River, a group of Maasai have settled in a village with mixed ethnicities and look forward to taking advantage of borehole irrigation to farm. Meanwhile they have used a small amount of irrigation water to grow water melons for sale and still have livestock on site, while most of the herds are in the distant Tanga Region.

The first part of the example satisfies expectations encouraged by the dominant discourse on climate change, in that it discusses increasing climate variability and growing hardship for people reliant on traditional, resource intensive livelihoods. The rest of the story, however, deviates from that narrative. Some Maasai have taken advantage of other global changes and have begun to adapt spontaneously to rainfall variability. Technological change in the form of irrigation, mobile phones and a motorbike transport system allow perishable goods to reach local markets more efficiently than before. Political and ideological changes banned the burning of pasture lands and contributed to the encroachment of woody species, and they are also responsible for many Maasai’s displacement from newly established national parks and hunting reserves – all in the interest of Conservation (with a capital “C”) and rational management of resources.

The dominant climate change adaptation narrative does not take into account local contexts. For example, urban environments need to be distinguished from rural ones in terms of impacts of global environmental change, and also in terms of the opportunities for adaptation offered by cultural and economic exchange. Recent field work revealed the vitality of cyclical market sites at various altitudes on gradients from highlands down into the surrounding plains. Fodder for stall feeding cows daily and dried fish move uphill; timber products and bananas move downhill. Preliminary data suggest that increased variability of climate has caused this trading and exchange to increase in volume and frequency (Wangui et al., 2012). Opportunities come along with risks, and rural adaptation sparks urban growth.

Such nuances at the local scale and interconnections among localities at different altitudes are not recognized by national level planners and policy makers in Tanzania. Tanzania was one of the earliest countries to produce a National Adaptation Plan of Action (NAPA), a report to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) through which Least Developed Countries identify “urgent and immediate needs – those for which further delay could increase vulnerability or lead to increased costs at a later stage” (UNFCCC, 2012). In the global South, NAPAs provide a unique insight into dominant adaptation framings that serve as the principal blueprint for both national adaptation planning and internationally-financed adaptation programs.

Tanzania’s NAPA paints a stark picture of undifferentiated rural poverty and vulnerability exacerbated by climate change. This generalized vulnerability is unmitigated by the dynamism and increasing differentiation of rural livelihoods, nor does it take into account established, local means of coping with climate stress (e.g. Eriksen et al., 2005). Indeed, the NAPA suggests that climate change is a “threat mainly to the agrarian population that still depends on subsistence agriculture for their daily livelihood” (United Republic of Tanzania, 2007: viii). This greatly simplified representation of rural livelihoods is made more problematic by a framing of drought vulnerability as wholly produced by climate variability, with no role for the wider set of social and political “root causes” of vulnerability (Wisner et al., 2004). The NAPA portrays rural communities and their development prospects as wholly at the mercy of the vagaries of climate, as “the major causes of these vulnerabilities at village, district and national levels is climate change associated with prolonged heavy rainfall or drought” (United Republic of Tanzania, 2007: 13).

The exception to this undifferentiated view of Tanzanian rural society is in the document’s evocation of climate stress-driven conflict, whereby “shrinkage of rangelands is likely to exacerbate conflicts between livestock keepers and farmers in many areas” (URT, 2007: 7). While no ecological explanation is provided for the imminent decrease in rangeland area, conflict is said to be likely because livestock carrying capacity has already been surpassed. In response, the NAPA recommends controlling movements of livestock, a deeply political proposal in light of ongoing land access struggles of Tanzania’s approximately 1.5 million pastoralists (Igoe, 2003; Goldman, 2011; Pearce, 2012).

Nothing in Tanzania’s official climate policy acknowledges the pivotal role of public goods and infrastructure as the matrix within which farmer and herder adaptations take place. More importantly, there is little or no reference to issues of governance, poverty or equity in adaptation. Early efforts to draw attention to governance issues (Paavola, 2004) and issues equity and justice (Paavola and Adger, 2002) are ignored in Tanzania’s NAPA. In short, the social drivers of vulnerability, the human capacity to adapt, and the value of local knowledge and participation are not adequately considered in national and international climate policies. A reductionist approach is inadequate for dealing with systemic problems.

Risk and vulnerability in linked systems

Systems thinking seems to be rediscovered by every generation. In the 1950s General Systems Theory inspired innovations in geography and human ecology long before “resilience thinking” was a twinkle in anyone’s eye. Kenneth Boulding’s (1985) systematic approach to nested physical, biological, and human systems pioneered the way long before a marketing niche was carved out for “sustainability science.” Whether one uses simple, common sense terms for the complex interactions among humans and their creations and the natural environment or call them socio-ecological systems, the referent is the same. Humans have created many systems, and they affect and are affected by nature in complex ways. These interactions bear heavily on risk and vulnerability, and are important to understand if transformations that support human security are the goal.

Demographic systems

The Tanzanian population, like many others in the global South, has grown, moved about in space, and changed characteristics such as age-sex ratios, health status, longevity, and educational level. Too much emphasis is given in some discourses of global environmental change and human security to mere growth in numbers and population density. There is no clear linear relationship between high density of population and degradation of the environment. In fact, studies in Nigeria and Kenya point in the opposite direction. The name of the now-classic Kenyan study is evocative: “More People, Less Erosion” (Tiffen et al., 1994). The mixing and sharing among people up and down the altitudinal gradients the author and his colleagues are studying in Tanzania’s North is partly driven by differences in density at different sites on the gradient and a wide range of other factors – interactions of population with other systems.

Economic systems

In the Tanzanian study sites, food security seems only partly about growing the family’s annual or semi-annual grain supply. To be able to purchase food and, in extreme circumstances, to command political or social entitlements to food, is critical. Think of the Maasai household growing and selling water melons. In the South Pare Mountains, a low coffee price and long bouts of coffee tree disease have seen many farmers turning to cultivation of root ginger, which has a good price and can be processed easily for added value. Climate may be changing in complex ways, but will this kind of innovation at farm scale keep ahead of the pressures of environmental change? This essential question is not being asked by modelers such as the World Institute for Development Economic Research (WIDER) team that visited Tanzania (Arndt et al., 2012) because their econometric paradigm blinds them to the creativity and innovativeness of the small farmers and herder.

Technological systems

In northern Tanzania a number of technologies have opened up economic opportunities in the face of pressure on traditional or customary livelihoods: transportation infrastructure, pre-paid mobile phones, tissue culture that allows efficient multiplication of new crop varieties, resurgence of organic farming techniques that reduce input prices and damage to ecosystems, availability of small mills for rice and sunflower, and growing use of decentralized energy sources (solar and wind). Local radio stations broadcasting in vernacular dialects bring weather and climate forecasts, and mobile phones are used for warning of floods.

Socio-cultural systems

Socio-cultural systems are important to risk and vulnerability in at least two ways. Social organization is one of these. The spontaneous adaptation to change discussed in this chapter is facilitated by many layers of social organization, some informal such as extended family and clan, and some formal such as civil society organizations. Such social capital has already been discussed above, and is used in a variety of ways. These organizations may be agents of change and spontaneous climate change adaptation.

Culture and language are also vital to understanding risk and vulnerability. “Climate” doesn’t translate well into Kiswahili, the lingua franca of Tanzania. The term tabia nchi (a neologism created by government to correspond to “climate” as opposed to weather = hali ya hewa) connotes the characteristics of place, not just climate. Participants in our study “misunderstand” the elite neologism; however, there is wisdom in the vernacular. Climate change only manifests and affects people, evoking adaptation, at the scale of landscapes and specific rural and urban sites. This is how farmers and herders experience climate change as one of many changes their parents and grandparents have had to live with. These sites of risk and opportunity – specific slopes, internal valleys, spring fed wetlands – are known by their flora and fauna, their water, grazing, soil characteristics, topography, accessibility, and, above all, histories. Linear groves of coconut palms and mango trees along water courses in some parts of Tanzania tell the story of slave caravans that repeatedly passed that way many years ago. It is difficult to speak with people about “natural hazards” in such a rich linguistic universe without also invoking “resources” and “opportunities,” and arriving through the momentum of discussion at subjects including “access” and “power.”

Political systems

Risk management at local scale and reduction of vulnerability requires partnerships between local political authorities, civil society, and communities. However, in many countries there is rhetorical and even legislated commitment to decentralization of government while human and financial resources are still retained by the central state. In the Highly Indebted Poor Countries (HIPC) and failed states, it is entirely possible that the government of the day has no motivation to devote resources to disaster risk reduction or to climate change adaptation at the local scale. National level training, workshops, travel overseas and, above all, mega-projects such as sea walls, dams, large scale agri-business schemes involving overseas corporations are much more profitable to the elite, whose cronies receive contracts and who have numerous opportunities for personal enrichment. These governments count on the fact that their rural and urban poor will not protest when disaster strikes. The elite will blame nature (and blame climate change) and sit back while the humanitarian community sorts things out, reestablishing the status quo ante (Susman et al., 1983; Mascarenhas and Wisner, 2012).

New agendas

There is a need not just for new agendas, but for new types of agendas that address not just the generic narratives about risk and vulnerability, but the underlying factors that contribute to them. This calls for transformative approaches, rather than for mere reforms based on generalized narratives.

Research agenda

The devil is in the details. Research must dig deep into local knowledge and practice and be open to surprises, especially the way in which people spontaneously adapt to interacting changes (including environmental and climate change). People are not inert or passive victims of hazard events resulting in disaster. They are agents with knowledge and capacity. The question is how to combine that local knowledge with external specialist knowledge better to provide social and personal protection. Although the IPCC’s study of climate extremes and disasters involved a number of social scientists, the study is still driven by top down modeling. Social science is the “junior partner.” However, if transformation is the goal, knowledge and capacity at the local scale has got to be the starting point (GNDR, 2009, 2011; Wisner et al., 2012c).

Even as the IPCC’s SREX was published, a team from WIDER presented a study in Tanzania that uncritically “downscaled” climate models to the sub-national scale (Arndt et al., 2012). This practice is highly questionable to begin with (e.g. Rosentrater, 2010). However, these researchers proceeded to combine questionable cropping and yield data and questionable rural income data with highly questionable climate projections. Their conclusion was that Tanzanian food security and economic development would suffer due to climate change. This macro view, even if backed by solid evidence and reliable models, still leaves the local adaptation of farmers out of the question.

Tanzanians farmers and herders understand their local reality and generally have managed to use this local knowledge to feed themselves. All of Tanzania’s over 100 language/cultural groups have sought food security by making use of the country’s great physical and cultural diversity. Food security practices have taken many forms: land preparation sensitive to micro-climate and use of a wide variety of agro-climatically suitable staples including rice, millet, sorghum, bananas, cassava and maize. This mosaic of dominant staple food crops was prevalent up to the 1970s when it was mapped by Mascarenhas (1973). Historically, there have been localized food shortages triggered by drought, floods, insect pests and conflict. However, at no time did the whole or even a large part of the country suffer from famine because of agroclimatic diversity (Mascarenhas, 1967). Agroclimatic and ethnic diversity is such in Tanzania that local markets may draw produce from a number of zones. Such choice at local markets provides another element of food security from the household point of view.

Policy agenda

National governments, donors, and international organizations have to treat disaster risk and vulnerability as development issues, not as specialist or technical problems to be “solved” with tech fixes and clever engineering. The large unspoken development question is often, “what policies are actually blocking local initiatives and spontaneous adaptation to change?” In the end, in many cases, it is often possible to do more with less – especially if local governments have the resources necessary to join in partnerships with civil society and communities. This is certainly the case in the villages along the altitude transect in our study in northern Tanzania. Farmers are experimenting with new crops and expanding traditional irrigation works (ndiva). In the lowest sites Maasai are supplementing herding with irrigation farming and trade. At the highest sites, clan-based protection of sacred forests (mbungi) – a tradition handed down for several centuries – now may become the basis for community access to funding from the UN’s REDD programme (Reduction of Emissions from Deforestation and Forest Degradation) (Bwenge et al., 2012).

But will governments take decentralization seriously and pass on international resources to local authorities and communities where this sort of innovation and spontaneous adaptation is occurring? There are 198 governments on Planet Earth. Some 168 of these signed on to the Hyogo Framework for Action (HFA), the detailed work plan created at the World Conference on Disaster Reduction held in Kobe, Japan in 2005. A good deal of new legislation, money spent on training at the national level, new government departments created, and some mega-projects later, little safety has trickled down to localities (GNDR, 2009; 2012). Just two years shy of the 2015 horizon of the HFA, as well as the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs), the post-HFA and post-MDG institutional architecture at the global scale seems set to continue business as usual. Although the Rio+20’s briefing papers (UNCSD, 2012: 4) include mention of the transfer of knowledge, technology and expertise to enhance capacity building for disaster risk reduction; the sharing of best practices and lessons learned; and the flow of appropriate support to and between developing countries for enhancing governance for disaster risk reduction and awareness at all levels, the same institutions have so far failed to coax national governments to take localities and people’s own knowledge and initiatives seriously. Further they have failed to get agreement on transformative measures in Rio, and failed to hold CO₂ emissions in check. There is new language, to be sure. “Resilience” is the new buzzword, and concepts such as inclusion, empowerment, and social protection are evident throughout the documents (UNISDR, 2012; UNCSD, 2012). Yet one grows weary of the same international bureaucracies repeating the same inspiring words. “Community participation” in disaster reduction has been a recurrent theme in the international discourse since 1994, when UNICEF, IFRC and civil society demanded a community perspective half way through an overwhelmingly engineering-dominated UNISDR.

Action agenda

International non-governmental organizations should lobby for the policies mentioned, and performance of donors, governments, and multi-lateral organizations should be monitored and measured not by the volume of the rhetoric, inputs at the national level and deliverables, but by outputs at the local scale, where people live. This is the minimum agenda for action. However, it will only ameliorate the situation, not deal with the root causes of vulnerability. For that a global campaign for transformation is required. Governments are simply too deeply interpenetrated by corporations and too committed to the economic growth capitalism demands by its very nature (Kovel, 2007; Swartzman, 2009, 2012).

The transformation required must be comprehensive, embracing production, consumption and, above all, governance. Wainwright and Mann (2012) describe what they call Climate Leviathan, a climate change control regime in the near future that would still be dominated by corporate interests although turned over by governments to an international entity. Clearly this would not constitute “transformation” in any sense and likely do little to address climate change. Going even further than Wainwright and Mann, Bigger states (2012: 1):

Conclusion

Thinking about the farmers and herders I have been visiting over the past five years and their difficulty in making sense out of the abstract, neo-Swahili terms for climate change and adaptation, they clearly belong to the “vast swath” of humanity that Bigger (2012) mentions. These Tanzanians understand climate change experientially, not abstractly, and they see and speak about it as one change among many. They also report that despite changes in the climate, their lives have improved over the past 10–30 years. Transformation for these rural, risk-adverse people is most likely to be acceptable if (a) it is incremental and (b) it brings material benefits with each increment.

While most climate change adaptation efforts so far have been sectoral, incremental and reactive, transformation should, in principle, be comprehensive, systemic and proactive (O’Brien, 2012). Frankly, that’s a very high goal. Since the stakes are so high for people and societies, it seems that transformation is possible, even if seemingly as an incremental process (O’Neill and Handmer, 2012) as long as governments are badgered by their citizens and civil society organizations to bridge sectoral “silos” and all stakeholders work hard proactively across the full range of changes, environments and securities with which this chapter began (Pelling, 2010; Wisner et al., 2012b). In 2010 Bolivia hosted the World People’s Conference on Climate Change and the Rights of Mother Earth, and this platform has continued to inform and mobilize, producing damning criticism of the weak results coming from the Durban COP and Rio +20 (World People’s Conference, 2012). In a variety of ways the Occupy movement, creation of a Japanese Green Party and German popular pressure to phase out its nuclear power stations and fully support renewable energy sources are also positive signs. Specifically dealing with natural hazards and climate change, the Global Network of Civil Society Organisations for Disaster Reduction (GNDR) now includes seventy countries and has become a major voice for local initiatives based on local knowledge creation and South-South cooperation (GNDR, 2012). There are thus already signs that transformation is possible, but whether it is realized at the scales needed for disaster risk and vulnerability reduction will depend on whether dominant thinking can change.

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