Risk Returns

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] 19

Education for sustainable development and

education for disaster risk reduction:

a winning combination

Olivier Laboulle, Assistant Programme Specialist and

Mark Richmond, Director, Division of Education for Peace and Sustainable Development, UNESCO

s long ago as the 18th century, the philosopher Jean-

Jacques Rousseau pointed out in one of his letters to

Voltaire that disasters were caused by the vulnerability

of the population rather than by the ‘God-made’ natural hazard

itself. After the earthquake that hit the capital of Portugal on 1

November 1755, Rousseau wrote: “concede, for example, that

it was hardly nature who assembled there twenty-thousand

houses of six or seven stories. If the residents of this large city

had been more evenly dispersed and less densely housed, the

losses would have been fewer or perhaps none at all. […] How

many unfortunates perished in this disaster for wanting to take

– one his clothing, another his papers, a third his money?”

Disasters are usually understood as the product of hazards and the

vulnerability of a community. As Rousseau implies, the same earthquake

striking an uninhabited desert would not have resulted in a disaster (or,

at any rate, not the same kind of disaster). Disaster risk reduction (DRR)

has therefore focused on reducing the one element of a disaster on which

communities have leverage, namely their vulnerability. Vulnerability can

be understood as ‘the characteristics and circumstances of a community,

system or asset that make it susceptible to the damaging effects of a

hazard’.

This approach is in stark contrast to previous views of disas-

ters as unavoidable ‘natural events’; events which needed

to be responded to once they had occurred but for which

no preparations would be put in place.

Hence, societies

have moved from the conception of a God-made disas-

ter (often seen as punitive in character) to distinguishing

between man-made vulnerability and immutable natural

hazards. The concept of vulnerability clearly links DRR (and

therefore DRR education) with the social, environmental

and economic dimensions of sustainable development.

Today, the world is not the same as the one that Rousseau

or even scholars and practitioners in the 1970s observed.

Countries and their educational systems are now facing

new challenges, for which UNESCO believes a more holis-

tic approach to DRR education in the context of education

for sustainable development (ESD) is needed.

Societies increasingly have to deal with something in

between an unalterable natural hazard and the condition of

mutable vulnerability, namely socio-natural hazards. The

latter describe the ‘increased occurrence of certain geophysi-

cal and hydro-meteorological hazard events arising from

the interaction of natural hazards with overexploited or

degraded land and environmental resources’.

Even though

deforestation, urbanization and agriculture have long

featured in human history, the rapid population growth of

recent decades combined with unsustainable consumption

and production patterns have contributed to global warming

and thereby affected the frequency and intensity of extreme

climate events such as flash floods.

On a local scale, defor-

estation and desertification have demonstrable effects on

local rainfall patterns and are implicated in the occurrence

of droughts.

It is against this background that UNESCO,

especially in the context of meteorological hazards and

climate change, advocates for the mainstreaming of a more

holistic DRR education that addresses mitigation and adap-

tation to hazards, thereby tackling both aspects of disaster

preparedness. This approach seeks to break the vicious

circle in which environmental degradation is a major factor

of increased disaster risk.

The relationship between DRR education and ESD

The arguments presented above posit a clear link between

natural hazards and unsustainable human activities

which can be best addressed by DRR education in the

2030b

The vicious circle of socio-natural hazards

More traditional DRR

education works ‘only’ on

reducing the vulnerability

of communities

Long-term and

holistic ESD

perspective to DRR

education tackles

human lifestyles and

general environmental

degradation

Increased environmental

degradation

Increased impact

of hazards on

ecosystems

Increased impact

of hazards on

ecosystems

Increased

vulnerability