Environmental geography and disaster management
Environmental geography and disaster management
The exam asks you to separate hazard from disaster, identify vulnerability, and propose mitigation that fits the Bengal context - floods, cyclones, landslides, drought, riverbank erosion and pollution.
Core rules
- Hazard is a potential event; disaster is the realisation of that hazard when it exceeds the community's capacity to cope. Risk ≈ (hazard × vulnerability) ÷ capacity.
- Elements of disaster management: prevention, mitigation, preparedness, response/relief, recovery, rehabilitation.
- Flood in West Bengal: heavy monsoon rain, embankment failure, siltation raising river beds, tidal backup in the delta, unplanned urban drainage. Cyclones: Bay of Bengal's warm shallow water and low shear make it the world's deadliest cyclone basin.
- Landslides in the Darjeeling hills: steep slopes, weak foliated rock, deforestation, road-cutting, heavy rain.
- Sundarbans reduces storm surge and sequesters carbon; it is also a Ramsar site and a World Heritage property.
- EIA identifies impacts before clearance and proposes mitigation; it is anticipatory, not post-hoc.
Worked example
Two delta blocks face the same cyclone surge. Block A has embankments, early-warning access and concrete houses; Block B has breached embankments, no warning system and mud houses. Which faces disaster risk? Reasoning: hazard is identical, so the difference is vulnerability and capacity. Block B has higher exposure of fragile housing, lower preparedness and lower coping capacity, so its risk is far higher even with an equal surge. Mitigation therefore targets embankment repair, cyclone shelters and warning dissemination rather than the cyclone itself.
Traps that cost marks
Using hazard and disaster as synonyms; offering relief as mitigation; blaming global warming alone for a local flood; describing the greenhouse effect as ozone depletion; writing "plant trees" without naming the hazard it addresses.