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Steve, Lee and Ksenia argue for a greater understanding that disasters arising from hazardous events are not natural and that we should therefore avoid using the term 'natural disaster'.
'A hazardous event that causes unacceptably large numbers of fatalities and/or overwhelming property damage is a 'natural disaster'.
(Definition from OAS.org, one of the resource links in AQA's A level Scheme of Work; emphasis theirs.)
This article presents an argument for avoiding the term 'natural disaster' in the teaching of geography. Every year, tens of thousands of deaths are linked to natural hazards (Roser and Ritchie, 2018), which are often described as 'natural disasters', and the poor and marginalised are disproportionately affected in these disasters. In this article we argue that the term 'natural disaster' unhelpfully obscures the socially constructed nature of disasters. Hazards arising from seismic, meteorological, hydrological, and similar events might properly be referred to as 'natural' because their occurrence appears to be independent of human interference. It is common - particularly in school geography - for the terms 'natural hazard' and 'disaster' to be conflated into 'natural disasters'. We argue that the term natural disaster is a misnomer, because in almost every instance there are fundamental human-induced factors that turn natural hazards into disasters. Calling them 'natural disasters' implies the abdication of human responsibility and a tendency towards fatalism (Bosher, 2008). We argue instead for an active approach towards understanding natural hazards and human relationships with them that is future-oriented, seeking solutions to prevent natural hazards leading to disasters.
'Natural disasters' and school geography
While we said at the beginning that the term 'natural disasters' is commonly used in school geography, analysis of National Curriculum and subject content materials reveals the opposite: the term is not used in any of the Department for Education (DfE) National Curriculum materials (for England) at key stages 1,2 or 3. Nor is the term used in the DfE subject content documents at either GCSE or A level. Similarly, the current awarding body examination specifications (drawing on these subject content documents) do not use the term at all. It is when we move from these 'formal representations of school geography' (Puttick, 2015, p. 29); from the curriculum as intention and closer to the curriculum as reality (Stenhouse,...