Introduction
One of my earliest encounters with environmental hazard was when, as a small boy, the concrete sea wall in my Sussex home town was smashed to pieces in a violent storm. Sometime later I discovered that not only had my great-grandfather been the first Clerk of the local Sea Defence Commissioners, but also that the sea wall – or promenade as we called it – was designed to protect those parts of the town which lay beneath sea level (Holmes, 1989). Quite why they had been built in such a situation didn’t occur to me. But then it often doesn’t seem to occur either to the millions of people who today flock to hurricane-affected coastlines in parts of the United States or who choose to live in the fire-prone ‘urban-wildland interface’ in much of Australia. Yet we now know that the insured losses from such hazards are only growing (Sturman & Quénol, 2024, p. 212). Therefore, this essay asks two questions: why do people engage in hazardous behaviours that put themselves and their assets at risk, and what can be done about it?
Geographers have long been interested in the intersection of human behaviour and environmental variability. The first part of the essay outlines some of key aspects of this work. But there has been less focus on why environmentally risky behaviours persist, the more so as the dangers of climate change become increasingly apparent, and as people seem immune to the ever more urgent warnings of climate scientists (Ripple et al., 2024). These issues are explored in the second part, ‘On the nature of nature’, which discusses the particular ways in which culture and the political economy of development frame our environmental understandings and attitudes. The third part, on ‘Re-inhabiting the earth’, identifies some emerging strategies that are available when thinking in more adaptive terms about how we might live in a climate-challenged world.
Environmental hazards and human behaviour
There is an extensive literature on environmental hazards, but it is the manner in which it is conceptualized that is of interest. Textbooks commonly distinguish between ‘natural’ and ‘technological’ hazards, according to whether the apparent source is a natural event such as an earthquake or flood, or an accident like an explosion or industrial fire (Smith, 2004). The term ‘natural hazard’ remains in persistent use, especially in the earth sciences. This is despite a long tradition of work in geography and environmental history that emphasizes that hazards are not physical phenomena that sit outside of society. Rather they are the product of the interaction of natural (or other processes) with human activities, whether understood from a behavioural perspective (Burton et al., 1993; Hewitt, 1997) or that of political economy (Klein, 2007; Pawson, 2011). Since ‘natural processes’ are not hazardous unless human life or property is at risk, a more conceptually accurate term is ‘environmental hazard’, where ‘environment’ is clearly a social construct. The distinction is evident in Ted Steinberg’s (2006) provocatively titled book Acts of God, whose subtitle is The Unnatural History of Natural Disaster in America.
Steinberg’s argument is that whereas it was once commonplace to interpret disasters as signs of God’s displeasure, as modern society became increasingly secularized, people began to see hazards as freak natural phenomena. This is usually the meaning of the term ‘Acts of God’ when used today, for example in political discourse or insurance policies. There are two corollaries: absolving humans of responsibility for the consequences of disaster at the same time as rendering such occurrences unusual. Steinberg discusses a number of examples, including the 1906 San Francisco earthquake and 1926 Miami hurricane, concluding that ‘Florida, like California, was not born risky. It was built that way’ (2006, 47). Both disasters were emptied of memory and meaning in the interests of subsequent real estate expansion. He also sees the policies of the Federal government, described as those of a ‘floodplain recidivist’, as facilitating mid and late twentieth century urban growth in risky places (2006, 97-115). A similar argument was made in New Zealand by Neil Ericksen (1986) twenty years earlier, in a lengthy report entitled Creating Flood Disasters? His recommendations for more secure urban development were largely ignored as the agency that commissioned the work was abolished in neoliberal government reforms that were intentionally shaped in the 1980s to prioritise economic growth.
There is a long history of identifying nature rather than people as the main culprit in generating environmental hazards. A vivid example is described in a classic of historical geography, Donald Meinig’s On The Margins of the Good Earth (1962), about the late nineteenth century wheat frontier in South Australia. It incorporates the story of the state’s Surveyor General, George Goyder, whose career has more recently been fully examined by Janis Sheldrick (2013). Through extensive on-the-ground knowledge of conditions across the state, Goyder developed an acute awareness of the nature of environmental variability and its likely impact on agricultural and pastoral viability. In the mid-1860s, he mapped what became known as Goyder’s Line, beyond which there was insufficient assurance that the wheat frontier could survive cyclical droughts (Figure 1). When the periodic rains that characterize semi-arid areas returned in the mid-1870s, farmers pushed back against the confines of the line, forcing its abandonment, only for ruinous drought to return a few years later. Again, this demonstrates the fallibility or dismissal of environmental memory. In 1885 Goyder was amongst the founders of the South Australian branch of the Royal Geographical Society, and after a term as president in 1894-5, became a life member.
Humans are therefore clearly implicated in the generation of environmental hazards. It is social behaviours that place lives and assets at risk by permitting expansion of activities in inherently problematic places, without sufficient humility or awareness of the liveliness of natural processes. In fact, it is often the case that attempts to control risk, through building sea walls or levees for example, only exacerbate the capacity for loss by encouraging even more intensive development. Climate change has brought an extra twist to this situation. The impact of hazards is now growing in severity not only because of such patterns of development but also from human impacts on nature. This is becoming more apparent with the growing incidence of climatic extremes, such as droughts, heatwaves and storms. For example, the heating of the oceans is supercharging the intensity of typhoons in the Pacific, hurricanes in the Caribbean and storms in the Mediterranean. The Guardian Weekly (2024) described the fatal floods in and around the Spanish city of Valencia as ‘Europe’s latest unnatural disaster’. Both the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC, 2022) and World Weather Attribution (2024) show how much more relentless and likely such events are becoming as a result of human-caused climate disruption. So why do people persist in acting in ways that produce such obvious and growing dangers?
The nature of nature
There are a number of potential explanations that can be grouped broadly into behavioural, cultural and political-economic categories. All have some validity in gaining purchase in understanding why people behave in ways that seem counter to their interests. One starting point is that this is obviously not how it often seems: environmental disasters are what happen to other people and other places. There is a lack of awareness that if this was ever the case, it is becoming less so. There are good reasons for this. News media tends not to focus or linger upon escalating risks in developing countries, such as the existential threat of sea level rise to Pacific Island states. And to take a first world example, managed retreat is controversial as people like to live by the sea, but do not like the threat to property values that comes with creation of coastal hazard zones. This has led to a search for more amenable terms such as ‘managed relocation’ (Pawson & Blakie, 2024). The value that many citizens derive from non-material goods such as the environmental amenity provided by unprotected locations at the seaside or in forested areas on the urban-wildland interface (Hays, 1987) exceeds the imagined risk of hazardous outcomes in such places.
In a cultural-historical sense, this is understandable. In recent years, the concept of the Anthropocene has gained currency to describe the present period of geologic time in which humans have become earth system agents, with the upturn of many indices (such as carbon emissions, water use and nitrate pollution) in a ‘Great Acceleration’ since the 1950s (Bonneuil & Fressoz, 2017). Human occupation of the earth coincided with the preceding Holocene era of 10 000 years, during which climatic conditions were generally favourable for the development of social life. Amitav Ghosh, who has done more than most writers to explore the liveliness of nature, both in fiction and non-fiction forms, describes how many cultural assumptions ‘were founded on the relative climatic stability of the Holocene’ (2016, 21). This was cemented during nineteenth century modernity when gradualist thinking about the earth ‘won by characterizing catastrophism as un-modern’ (2016, 22). As a result, literature, historical writing and political discourse have been shaped in the last two centuries by habits of mind that banish the unpredictable to the realm of elsewhere. This is reflected in the commonly used terms to describe climate breakdown, such as ‘global warming’ or ‘climate change’, which are relatively non-threatening and gradualist (Carrington, 2019).
In turn, such perspectives reflect long-standing ideas about human relations to nature - at least in the west, although through processes of colonialism and globalisation these have become more widely hegemonic. Historical scholars, including geographers and environmental philosophers, have long argued that such ideas are not monolithic and range from environmental dominion to stewardship and more spiritually infused positions (Attfield, 1983; Glacken, 1967). Nonetheless, the characteristic assumption of modernity has been of a powerful separation of humans from nature, seeing themselves as superior to, detached from, and empowered relative to an inanimate environment. A particular interpretation of Christian doctrine, subsequently reinforced by what Marx described as ‘the civilising influence of capital’, justified the subjugation of nature, envisaging it as a passive stage on which human affairs are to be played out (Thomas, 1984, pp. 23–5). The colonial enthusiasm for ‘improvement’ of both indigenous nature and people was a direct inheritance of this position (Pawson et al., 2025), as was the founding of many colonial, now world, cities on sites adjacent to the ocean. Examples like New York, Mumbai, Singapore and Hong Kong are in far more vulnerable locations than older inland ports such as Hamburg, Stockholm, Malacca and Guangzhou (Ghosh, 2016). This reflected the belief that human ingenuity and the application of technology could overcome any problem likely to occur.
In recent decades, climate policies have frequently relied on technocentric approaches, imbued with an assumption that ‘business-as-usual’ can persist either because a climate emergency does not fit with human superiority in nature, or that a long history of improving nature with technology will provide a way out. It is hard to know how else to explain the extensive levels of urban development that have accompanied the neoliberal financialization of real estate since the 1980s. This has frequently led to ‘improvement’ of risky places in far more intensive ways than that which Goyder sought to forestall in the 1860s. For example, the state of Florida, one of North America’s most vulnerable locations in the face of sea level rise and dangerous hurricanes, has permitted much of its coastline to be built on. There are tax advantages for local governments in this, and until the recent threat of insurance retreat, a belief that others will pay in case of disaster. Florida is a microcosm of the conundrum of a globalising world behaving as if its dedication to growth has available several planets when in reality there is only one. The political fiction of economic growth has allowed humanity to become completely unmoored from the earth, such that now we ‘either deny the existence of the problem, or else we look for a place to land’ (Latour, 2018, p. 5).
Re-inhabiting the earth
There is an old definition of academic geography as ‘the study of the earth as the home of people’ (Tuan, 1991, p. 99), one that can be usefully revived. We know from the concept of environmental hazards discussed earlier that the earth and its vitalities, such as storms, fire, animals, plants - in other words all its more-than-human actors – do not sit outside society. As Bruno Latour puts it, ‘If the Terrestrial is no longer the framework for human action, it is because it participates in that action’. The crucial choice now faced is therefore one of business-as-usual, framed within the old assumptions of modernity, or something attainable within one world: ‘to modernize or to ecologize’ (Latour, 2018, pp. 42, 46). In more mundane terms, ‘ecologizing’ requires dramatic mitigation of the harmful effects of human activities in order to attempt to stay within planetary boundaries (Folke et al., 2021; Ripple et al., 2024). At the same time, there is an urgent need for adaptation of environments to protect people and their assets in the face of the impacts of heating already baked into the earth-atmosphere system (Sturman & Quénol, 2024).
Some of the most potentially effective means of adaptation are nature-based solutions, those that build on the participation of the more-than-human in human life (Cloke et al., 2023). Not only might these ameliorate the impacts of climate breakdown, but they can alleviate the parallel crisis of global biodiversity loss. A striking feature of modernity has been its simplification of landscapes and life into monolithic systems for the industrial production of cereals, pastures, feed crops and vegetable oils (Pawson et al., 2025). There has been a consequential loss of species, such that humans (32 percent) and their domestic animals (65 percent) now comprise 97 percent of the total biomass of land vertebrates, leaving only 3 percent for all wild vertebrate species (Bonneuil & Fressoz, 2017). But nature-based solutions potentially yield a range of other benefits, including ecosystem services to protect against heatwaves and floods, recreation and health gains, as well as environmental amenity and a sense of place (Roe & McCay, 2021). Nature-based interventions have also been conceived as a tool in urban competitive advantage (Garvin, 2016). They take a range of forms in urban and rural contexts, such as coastal buffer zones, blue-green corridors, rewilded streams and wetlands, parks and gardens, and vegetation canopy development (Wilson, 2023).
The growing incidence of heatwaves is clearly linked to climate change (Sturman & Quénol, 2024). Singapore and Rio de Janeiro are examples of cities that have developed nature-based policies to enhance thermal comfort. The ‘garden city’ programme in Singapore began with independence in 1965, aimed at improving air quality and building a post-colonial profile. More recently, the goal has switched to a ‘city in the garden’, to deliver a range of sustainability benefits such as outdoor cooling, reduced energy consumption in buildings and stormwater management (Figure 2). A government agency, NParks, is responsible for tree canopy development, encouraging green walls and roofs, and developing a connected network of urban biodiversity (Newman, 2014). Rio, like Singapore a city of over 6 million people, has a long history of interventions to restore elements of the Atlantic forest in the city. In this tradition, since the 1980s the Refloresta Rio municipal programme has trained local workers to afforest a total of 3500 hectares, initially on steep slopes around favelas to reduce the risk of landslips and fire, and to discourage further development of dangerous slopes (Malleret, 2024).
Such initiatives are being undertaken in towns and cities worldwide (Beatley, 2011; Garvin, 2016). An important component, as the risk of intense storm events grows, is water management in catchments and on coasts. A nature-based approach in this context is encapsulated in the title of May Joseph’s book, Fluid New York. She describes the impact of Hurricane Sandy in 2012 in exposing the inadequacy of its hard harbour and river edges armoured for industry and real estate. Slowly the city is reclaiming its ‘archipelagic geography’ with buffering initiatives like the Brooklyn Bridge Park and greenways around Manhattan, recognising, as in many places, that ‘water is a defining, though till recently much-neglected, topography shaping its urban identity’ (Joseph, 2013, p. 22). The urgency of rectifying that neglect in favour of less rigid approaches, including retreat, is now widely recognised (Steinberg, 2014; Wilson, 2023). Some cities have adopted more wide-reaching nature-based plans, such as Hamburg in Germany which - like Singapore - now has a metropolitan-wide network of blue-green connections for flood control, recreation and biodiversity enhancement (Urban Nature Atlas, 2021). Another example is Guangzhou in southern China, which is reconceptualizing the value of its urban streams to similar ends (Urban Sustainability Exchange, 2024). These fit into a city-wide ecological narrative that identifies three zones in the city: its lungs (protected green spaces on the urban edges), heart (parks and gardens in the city centre) and kidneys (its rivers and wetlands).
These are a few examples of the beneficial effects of co-opting nature as infrastructure in attempts to adapt to life in a dangerously warming world, one in which the risks of physiologically challenging heatwaves and damaging intense storms are becoming more frequent. Such events cannot be regarded as ‘natural’, as the human burning of fossil fuels, and the hazardous location of human activities, are deeply implicated. The scientific consensus is that the world has already passed the 1.5 degrees of atmospheric heating that was identified in the Paris Agreement in 2015 as a safe limit. Clearly the language of climate change, including the use of numbers that sound relatively insignificant, has not helped drive a sufficient collective response. Nor has a cultural context in which the more-than-human world is not credited as the lively participant in social life that it is. Building walls, either conceptual or concrete, does not work. More realistic forms of adaptation, alongside progressive mitigation of emissions, are unavoidable.
Conclusion
I grew up in a town in Sussex built partly below sea level and defended by a sea wall. Years later, in Aotearoa, my adopted city of Christchurch was extensively damaged in the Canterbury earthquake sequence of 2010-13 (Cloke et al., 2023). Some areas near the coast sank by up to a metre, in effect generating the equivalent of a century’s worth of sea level rise in a matter of seconds. The earthquakes underlined several things about the manner of relationships between people and nature that have been explored in this essay. The city had originally been founded as a British colonial settlement in the 1850s. The surveyors knew little of the environmental context of the site that they chose. In fact it lies at the seaward edge of the delta of one of the South Island’s great gravel-bed rivers. It had been under the sea only a few thousand years previously. Ground conditions, alternating between wetlands and sand dunes, reflected its deltaic history. Subsurface lenses of water, which added to its instability under seismic stress, were not visible to those new to this landscape.
Local indigenous Māori inhabitants of the district read the landscape differently, maintaining their permanent settlements in drier places away from the delta. Their use of the wetlands was seasonal and for purposes of mahinga kai, the harvesting of plants, waterfowl and fish, such as tuna (eel), kanakana (lampreys) and kēkēwai (freshwater crayfish). The infrastructure of the city of Christchurch was therefore developed in a location whose traditional owners had practiced quite different environmental values. But where they saw liveliness and bounty, European settlers saw an empty but convenient space waiting to be ‘improved’. In this, it mirrored the risky locational choices made for other colonial cities founded around the same time. Improvement initially took the form of open drains to combat flooding of new streets and suburbs, followed by lined or piped wastewater channels to facilitate urban development (Christchurch City Council, 2024). By the time of the earthquakes, the city had a population of over 400 000 people as the largest in the South Island.
As a result of the seismic damage to property and infrastructure sustained mainly from ground liquefaction and deformation, the New Zealand government (‘the Crown’) decided that significant areas of the city should be red zoned. That meant abandoning whole suburbs, including some that had been developed for housing within the preceding two decades. In effect, although not labelled as such, this was an officially-sponsored process of managed retreat, with the Crown buying out all those homeowners who could be persuaded to move, about 8000 households in all. In exchange for compensation, the Crown gained access to home insurance payouts. Following subsequent regeneration planning, the red zoned areas are now being used as opportunities for nature-based restoration to provide a climate change buffer for the rest of the metropolitan area (Pawson & Blakie, 2024). Insurance has therefore provided the means for provision of a more resilient city in the face of further possible seismic events and sea level rise. It is a radically different outcome to one in which people attempt to rebuild expensive structures in hazardous places that are then at increasing risk of future harm and loss. And it echoes patterns of blue-green infrastructure development that are emerging in cities across the world, as adaptive investments designed to provide some measure of security in globally hazardous times.