Disasters happen in society, of which economy is a subset. Compare the extent of damage an earthquake would cause in a Mongolian desert with people living in tents with the extent of the damage experienced in Hazara and Azad Kashmir with defective public buildings, inappropriate private housing and denuded slopes facilitating landslides.

Nature had nothing to do with this lack of observance of a buildings code, transparency in public construction and planned forestation. Nor had it anything to do with the absence of cranes and bulldozers in the area.

While the earthquake could not have been predicted or prevented, there was knowledge available about the Himalayan tectonic drift towards the north, which was not used to reach a minimum level of preparedness. The coordination paralysis prevailing in the immediate aftermath delayed relief. All these man-made factors, operating in an environment of mass poverty in the area, made the people extremely vulnerable. Thus impact of the natural hazard was multiplied by the vulnerability of the people several-fold.

Dealing with disasters is not a matter of waiting for an act of God and describe it as His punishment for the sinful acts of the poor, as was done by the clergy in the NWFP. Again, it is not just a matter for a rescue army, relief bureaucracy or a hurriedly set up reconstruction agency. Indeed, disasters are too serious a matter to be left to natural scientists and rescue and relief forces. As vulnerability magnifies the damage to lives and livelihoods and consequently a society may have to be reconstructed, social scientists have a role that they have neglected in Pakistan.

The role of the social scientists in disaster management is an important theme of the 17th biennial general conference of the Association of Asian Social Science Research Councils (AASSREC) which this writer is attending in Nagoya University in Japan as a representative of the Council of Social Sciences (COSS), Pakistan. Within a month of the giant earthquake and tsunami that struck Sumatra island of Indonesia in late 2004, Nagoya University organised a team of physical and social scientists for a comprehensive interdisciplinary understanding of its after effects. The research team included such diverse skills as economists, sociologists, anthropologists, psychologists, political scientists, geographers and seismologists. Four field surveys were conducted in the city of Banda Aceh and its surrounding district.

According to Professor Makoto Takahashi, natural disasters are “catastrophic restructuring of interrelationships, which the society has made with its physical environment for a long time, and therefore should be analysed from the perspectives of the mixed factors of natural hazards and social conditions often called vulnerability.” The study found that the damages to life and property corresponded to the differences in geo-environment resulting from lack of proper spatial planning and unregulated urbanisation. Secondly, an asymmetric power relationship between national and local governments resulted in weak coordination to provide assistance to those who lost most.

Finally, the preparedness was undermined by the fact that the people had no prior understanding of tsunami. They knew earthquake, but the local language word associating earthquake with tsunami, “abuna”, could hardly be recalled by one out of ten persons. So when flooding hit the land, people thought that the end of the world had arrived. While the localized community-based knowledge had been forgotten, the government was not prepared at all.

In our own context, the local population had not forgotten the local knowledge about the possible extent of flooding and informed authorities before the construction of Mirani dam in Balochistan, but the authorities did not think it was probable. According to official calculations, a flood level of 244 feet above mean sea level had one chance in 200 years. The last flood was recorded at 271 feet above mean sea level, destroying all houses in three union councils.

Again, an example of political allocation: the 1999-2001drought had affected Balochistan the most, but the $360 million Drought Emergency Relief Assistance Programme allocated 30 per cent of the funding to that province. In Karachi, the billboards brought down by strong gale-winds caused many deaths. The chief executive described it as God’s punishment for obscenity, rather than catching those who flouted rules in putting them up in the first place.

Economic, sociological, cultural, political and psychological factors way heavily in the making of any disaster and its aftermath. They can only be ignored at the expense of sustainability. Papers by two Japanese experts at the conference emphasised industry-academia cooperation for disaster prevention at ports. To the objectives of protecting life and port facilities must be added the protection of economic and industrial activities to protect the supply chain. This would require strengthening of social infrastructure. KPT can learn a lesson or two from what is being planned for Nagoya port to prevent disasters.

Disasters are firmly placed within the overall study of environment and sustainable development. Professor Yoshikawa, a former president of the Science Council of Japan, delivered an insightful lecture on “Scientists in Society.” His main thesis was that working in their laboratories, the scientists have benefited as well as threatened sustainability. With challenges such as global warming, natural and social scientists will have to closely interact with each other to work for the survival of the world.

The approaching environmental limits require, in the opinion of Professor Margaret McKean of Duke University, adaptation of political, social and economic institutions to the demands of scarcity. H. Uzawa, a celebrated economist, warned that sustainable management of the fast depleting natural capital needs what he calls social common capital, which itself is in short supply.

A framework worth exploring to understand the interrelationships of science and society was proposed by the chairman of the International Human Dimension Programme, Oran R. Young – the Vulnerability, Resilience and Adaptation Framework. The movement, in short, is towards a sustainable society, But this objective, said sociologist Dai-yeun Jeong of South Korea, necessitates the change of socio-cultural ethos from consumerism to environmentalism, something easier said than done.