Why Are Some Countries More Resilient Than Others During Acts of God?

Abstract

International human rights laws protect us from natural disasters, but how human rights violations cause/perpetuate natural disasters is unclear. Earthquakes can be devastating and are believed to be independent of climate change. Wildfires are believed to be at least partially influenced by climate change, and their unpredictability often leads to unexpected increases in mortality and morbidity. A panacea for increased natural disaster resiliency exists for all types of natural disasters through an increase in each country’s World Happiness Report Score (WHRS). This score not only considers human rights violations, but a multitude of factors: GDP per capita, social support, health life expectancy, freedom to make life choices, generosity, trust, and perceptions of corruption. I created two data sets, one for earthquakes and one for wildfires by merging information from the EM-DAT database, the Significant Earthquake Database, World Happiness Reports 2012-2017, the CIA World Factbook, and Human Rights Watch Reports 1990-2016. This data was used to explore the hypothesis of each country’s human rights violation score being negatively correlated with natural disaster resiliency (using multivariate analysis to control for other factors). Results indicated that human rights violations are statistically significant in predicting natural disaster resiliency, and by looking at two cases studies of data that were highly influential for all MLR models (2010 Haiti Earthquake and the 2013 Yarnell Wildfire), I conclude that most of the deaths from catastrophic natural disasters are humanitarian failures. I discuss the possibility that true natural disasters (ones free from anthropogenic origins) are inherently destructive, but not necessarily deadly.