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So why am I here? My background is in geography and I developed that into development studies,

took that into development studies many years ago, and I wrote my first paper on disasters in 1976,

to which you're all supposed to go, how is that possible, you're not that old.

So I was about 10 at the time.

And that was written in India during not a very serious flood, but what I noticed was that in the Ganges Plain,

where I was doing quite a lot of my field work, the villages, many of them, are on a sort of a mound.

And the richer people, the higher castes live in the middle, and the outcasts and the poorer people live around the edge.

So of course the poorer people get flooded first.

So it's my first kind of concrete example of social differentiation leading to different outcomes for different social groups in a disaster,

or in a relatively minor flood.

I was then in Patna, which is the main city of the state of Bihar,

and discovered quite interestingly that the British had instituted flood protection measures for the city

in the form of what they called a ringbund. A bund is a word for a wall,

and a ringbund is one that surrounded the city to keep the flood waters of the Ganges out.

But of course keeping the water out of the city meant that the water had to go somewhere else.

So this was quite an interesting way in which we still have this problem today of flood defenses

may be all right for some people, but they transfer the risk to others.

So I had a very interesting time, and I wrote that article, which never became famous,

almost exactly the same time as O'Keefe, Ken, and Ben wrote this one, which is down here at the front,

which uses a sort of an archaeological excavation to get this up,

which is called taking the naturalness out of natural disasters.

And this was part of the process that several of the people in this room were involved in,

which was to take the idea that disasters were at all natural and undermine that and unpack it,

and insist that disasters are socially constructed.

That has been the process that has gone basically in the last 30 years.

It still hasn't succeeded completely, as I'll show in a minute,

but basically the argument has shifted quite fundamentally during that period of time,

certainly in academia and certainly in some of the organizations that deal with development and disasters,

has shifted away from the idea of their naturalness towards the idea of their being socially constructed.

And that has been a major achievement really in that process.

So we'll be coming back to that, and I'll say a bit more about that.

So my background is in geography. I then studied economics and politics.

And my work in relation to disasters, because I've done a lot of other work on India and China as well,

has focused on how do we explain the vulnerability of people?

What is it about society, economics, politics, and culture later,

which explains why some people suffer more in disasters than others?

And that has been really the driving force for my work.

But within that, I really am not all that interested in disasters.

And that might sound rather strange.

But the reason for that is relatively few people die in disasters as compared with other problems of everyday life.

So I think I mentioned yesterday that until relatively recently,

each year more children died under the age of five of five preventable diseases

than died in the entire 20th century from sudden onset disasters.

So part of writing at risk was to question why are so many people interested in disasters?

Of course, they grab our attention. They grab the headlines in the news and the media.

And we have an emotional response to them, an emotional response,

which is actually so significant, as I was talking to some people last night over dinner,

that after the Japanese disaster two years ago, people were collecting money for it.

Why? To give money to one of the richest countries in the world.