There are no purely natural disasters

The catastrophe resulting from what we call “natural” disasters is the result of human choices, policies, and systems as much as the weather. Often natural disasters result from fragility introduced to a system, where the weather is just a tipping point. Consider the Bengal famine of 1770. The natural cause was drought, but the policies of the British East India Company leading up to the famine and in response to it greatly magnified the scale of death. Nobel prize-winning Indian economist Amartya Sen described it as a “man-made famine”, though from a systems perspective all famines are to some extent human-made.

Examples

• During famines in both Ireland and India, the English occupiers continued to export crops for profit while people starved. Such a policy contributed at least as much as blight and drought to the death toll.