Assessing seismic safety from a justice standpoint

Abstract

Disasters occur when a hazard interacts with an exposed and vulnerable society or community, whose capacities to cope with the hazardous event are exceeded. The fact that large, damaging earthquakes impact different segments of society disproportionately can be perceived as an injustice. Conceptualizing this problem within the domain of justice implies a recognition that its source is the result of an unequal social system formed by a long sequence of human decisions, and not by God’s or nature’s desires. The discussion of disaster justice is still nascent, with the term itself being coined only in 2010. However, disaster justice can be understood as a concern of how the crisis and systemic collapse caused by disasters bring issues of socioecological justice to the front. Disaster justice stems from, builds on, and refers to some of the concepts and claims of environmental and climate justice, but expands them to address the scale, scope, dynamics, and challenges that are particular to disaster contexts as opposed to normal times. This article presents the different frameworks of social justice in the context of environmental hazards (i.e., environmental, climate, and disaster justice) and opens the discussion about how justice claims can be incorporated into the discussion and practice of providing seismic safety and increasing disaster resilience