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Poverty and Environmental Hazards - The Effects Of Environmental Hazards On The Poor, Which Areas Are Most Vulnerable To Natural Disasters?

Conditions in the environment that have a negative impact on the health and well-being of a population are known as environmental hazards. These can be natural events, such as an overabundance of insects that destroys crops; a weather pattern that causes a drought or flood; or a sudden, violent disaster such as an earthquake or volcanic eruption. Environmental hazards can also be human-caused problems such as air and water pollution, chemical toxicity, or a poor use of resources that brings about environmental degradation. These events can have an immediate, devastating impact, or they can have more extended consequences. A famine, for example, might cause hundreds of thousands of people to starve to death over a number of months, or exposure to pollution might be associated with long-term health effects over several generations.

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Poverty and Environmental Hazards - The Effects Of Environmental Hazards On The Poor

Throughout the world, the poor are more often and more severely affected by environmental hazards, including both daily pollutants and large-scale disasters. In a study published in the Annual Review of Public Health (vol. 23, 2002, http://publhealth.annualreviews.org/cgi/reprint/23/1/303.pdf), Gary W. Evans and Elyse Kantrowitz found that low-income Americans are more likely to be exposed, and ex…

Poverty and Environmental Hazards - Which Areas Are Most Vulnerable To Natural Disasters?

In the e-book Natural Disaster Hotspots: A Global Risk Analysis (March 2005), researchers for the World Bank reported that more than half the global population, 3.4 billion people, are vulnerable to natural disasters, especially in Bangladesh, Nepal, the Dominican Republic, Burundi, Haiti, Taiwan, Malawi, El Salvador, and Honduras, where more than 90% of the population of each country is at risk o…

Poverty and Environmental Hazards - The Natural And Human-made Disaster Of Famine

Famine is the phenomenon of large-scale starvation in a population because of a severe shortage of food or a lack of access to food. It can be caused by natural occurrences such as drought, flooding, or pestilence, or it can be the result of war, in which food is used as a weapon, or even unwise government policies. It is, overall, one of the most devastating events human beings can experience and…

Poverty and Environmental Hazards - Natural Disasters Of 2004–05

The years 2004 and 2005 saw three natural disasters so devastating that they shocked the world. All of them had an especially powerful impact on the poor. One was in a high-poverty area that was also a popular tourist destination for the wealthy; the second was in a desperately impoverished zone with treacherous terrain and little outside contact; and the third, in one of the world's riches…

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