Originally published in Human Futures Magazine (August 2022)
Part I: Why the future is not just vuca, but vucca
In the first half of the 20th century, two of the most prominent philosophers of the Frankfurt school, Walter Benjamin, and Theodor Adorno, established the term permanent catastrophe. Benjamin and Adorno predominantly used the term for any rupture and conceptual revolution in history that was regarded as (civil, technological, or economic) progress by anyone benefitting from it, while those that had been overthrown perceived it as an ever-present defeat.
In the short- and midterm future of the Anthropocene, an era in which human-induced climate change triggers an increase in weather and climate extremes in every region across the globe IPCC, 2021), this largely forgotten concept of permanent catastrophe may regain traction. It can perhaps even be used to describe the inherent state of the world – even though in a different form than the thinkers of the Frankfurt School imagined it to be.
This article explores what catastrophes are and how they differ from similar concepts before outlining why catastrophes will become ever more relevant to all aspects of human life as well as an increasingly important subject in foresight and futures studies.
The vuca world as we know it
Before the backdrop of the 4th Industrial Revolution, economic, political, and social spheres are changing. Emerging intelligent technologies have begun to “drive radical shifts in the way we live […], the way we produce and transport goods and services, the way we communicate, the way we collaborate, and the way we experience the world around us” (Schwab, 2018, pp. 40-41). Buzzwords like disruptive innovation, digital transformation and – most prominently – the vuca (volatile, uncertain, complex, ambiguous) world have evolved into commonplaces in academic literature, management trainings and daily press. These changes are not only radical but occur at an ever faster pace: what we experience today may well be the climax of the “Great Acceleration”, i.e. the exponentially increasing human activity since 1945 (McNeill & Engelke, 2013).
This accelerating change in the human sphere that is characterised by a surge in growth rates of economies, populations and use of technologies leaves a substantial imprint on the Earth System. The Environmental Sciences have tracked the effects of the Great Acceleration in several previously stable indicators and thus call for the proclamation of a new geological epoch in which human activity, predominantly the global economic system, is the prime driver of change in the Earth System: the Anthropocene (https://www.anthropocene.info/great-acceleration.php).
Some effects of this human-induced climate change are already visible in today’s environment. In 2021 only, the on-going Covid-19 pandemic, the deadly summer heat waves in North America and Southern Europe, and severe floods in several regions of Central Europe have demonstrated the impact of regional hazards on the globalised political and social system. Longer-term effects include desertification (Burrell, Evans & De Kauwe, 2020), soil degradation (Borrelli et al., 2020), and droughts (Büntgen et al., 2021). Social consequences of altered environmental conditions are also beginning to manifest, as social unrests over food prices (Fritsche et al., 2011), mass migrations like the one from Central to North America (Barretti, 2019; Lustgarten, 2020) and armed conflict over water and other resources (ICRC, 2021) demonstrate.
State-of-the-art scientific models predict that hazards linked to climatic change are likely to exacerbate in intensity, frequency, and global impact in the near and mid-term future (IPCC, 2021). How this will impact specific regions and the global community remains yet unknown. What is, in contrast, certain is that faced with the challenges of climatic change, the ever-accelerating, hyperconnected, digitalised, and highly fragile vuca world acquires another dimension: it becomes vucca – volatile, uncertain, complex, catastrophic, and ambiguous.
Before this dimension is explored in more detail, the most relevant terms will be defined.
On terminology: hazards, vulnerability, disasters, and catastrophes
In everyday parlance and media coverage, extreme natural events from droughts to floods and earthquakes are commonly referred to as natural disasters or catastrophes. Events with similar impact on human society are categorised differently, as is demonstrated by research framing the events in Chernobyl in 1986 as a nuclear disaster, while the Deepwater Horizon oil spill is considered an industrial disaster (Dixon & Gawley, 2017). In Japan, the sequence of earthquake, tsunami, and reactor explosion in Fukushima in 2011 has been given the attribute of a three-fold or triple disaster (Shackleton, 2019; McCurry, 2015).
This terminology implies that disasters originate outside of human society or in a specific sphere within it. Sociological research into disasters and their origins, however, has demonstrated that disasters do not emerge in an extra-societal or isolated realm. They must rather be considered long-term processes within the human sphere that are created or prevented by society and largely shaped by culture (Kelman, 2020). While the origins and causes of disasters lie neither in nature nor in technology or in isolated human error, natural, technological, or man-made events do play a crucial role in their unfolding. Disasters are thus multi-dimensional processes that comprise of external and of socio-cultural components (Oliver-Smith, 2002).
The external dimension is constituted by hazards that the United National International Strategy on Disaster Risk Reduction (UNISDR) defines as “dangerous phenomena, substances, human activities or conditions that may cause loss of life, injury or other health impacts, property damage, loss of livelihoods and services, social and economic disruption, or environmental damage.” (UNISDR Terminology on Disaster Risk Reduction, 2009, p17). Unlike disasters, hazards are semantically neutral processes or events that deviate from the established rules and patterns within a society or organisation. For the affected, in most cases hazards occur unexpectedly – either because the time and place of their onset could not be predicted, because their intensity exceeds the anticipated level, or because they were regarded as too improbable to happen (Kelman, 2020). This lack of anticipation, and the resulting failure to prepare for specific or general hazards, is a risk factor that increases a society’s vulnerability.
The exact conditions that create vulnerability are often obscure and can only be exposed with great difficulty prior to the onset of a hazard. Moreover, any social, cultural, or infrastructural change as well as fluctuations in human knowledge influence vulnerability by eliminating some existing risks and introducing new flaws to the system (Cook, 1998). As both the system and human expertise constantly change, vulnerability is a dynamic rather than a constant state of the system. Despite this dynamic character, vulnerability is there long before a hazard occurs – and so is disaster.
Etymologically, the term disaster is derived from the Latin dis-astrum and literally means “unlucky star” or star of misfortune. Thus, the term reflects an old assumption that can be observed in several historical cultures: that processes in nature are interconnected and extreme events can be predicted by closely observing alterations in the night sky or other parts of nature. Moreover, the term explicitly links negative developments in the social sphere to the natural or the extra-human sphere (Walter, 2019).
Despite this close link to an external realm and in contrast to many hazards, disasters are purely social processes (Perry, 2005; Kelman, 2020) that are shaped by the actions and properties of the affected community or society. If a hazard intersects with a largely unprepared – or already dysfunctional – society or organisation, it interrupts habitual normalcy and provokes uncertainty among the members (Toner, 2013). If this uncertainty reaches a degree in which it leads to the (temporary) disruption of social functions, the disastrous processes previously invisible processes become visible. This condition is generally called disaster.
Once named as such, disasters have been categorised according to various core characteristics like triggers (natural, technological hazards etc.), speed of the hazard’s onset (from rapid onset like earthquakes to slow onset like droughts), or scale and effects. Which of these taxonomies is used depends both on the context of the disaster and the focus of interest. What can be considered true regardless of other classifications, is that the conditions referred to as disasters belong to a category of events that are characterised by their un-ness (Boin, t’Hart & Kuipers, 2017): They are
- unexpected because the triggering event, its intensity or time of onset are either not anticipated or underestimated in their consequences to the community
- undesirable, as only those events that cause physical damage and disrupt social ‘normalcy’ are perceived as disasters
- unprecedented, because no comparable hazard had struck the community in the (known) past
- unmanageable, because many social functions necessary for the management of the situation are disrupted in disaster situations.
This nature of disasters implies two things: first, it is difficult to impossible for any society or organisation to exhaustively prepare for disaster as any society or organisation is an intrinsically hazardous complex system in which disaster “is always just around the corner” (Cook, 1998). Second, it is equally hard to define universal predispositions that make a region or society vulnerable to disaster, as in many cases the crucial features and interactions that fostered or prevented a specific disastrous event can only be identified from an ex-post perspective. It can thus be deduced that disaster itself begins with the emergence of potentially disastrous conditions and processes within society – and thus long before it becomes visible.
If this visible process of disaster that has been triggered by a hazard is severe or sustainable enough to cause a failure of the prevailing cultural system, i.e. radical cultural change initiated by the upsetting of routines, altering of norms, and violation of previously existing order and hierarchies, disaster evolves into catastrophe.
The term catastrophe has its roots in Ancient Greek and is a composite of the preposition kata (κατά, ‘downwards’) and the verb strefein (στρέφειν; to turn over). A catastrophe thus describes a movement of reversing, turning upside down or upending. Applied to social processes, in Greek Antiquity it indicated that someone or something would subdue, be upset, end, or die. Nevertheless, while the ancient Greeks viewed catastrophes as processes of radical change, this transformation and its results were not necessarily negative (Walter, 2019).
This is in stark contrast with the modern usage of the term. While in everyday parlance it is common to use catastrophe as synonym for disaster, current disaster research makes a gradual distinction between the two terms: catastrophes are defined as particularly severe cases of disasters that
- heavily impact most or all built structures
- suspend usual local services like medical care or policing (often due to a high number of fatalities among officials)
- sharply and simultaneously interrupt most or all everyday community functions
- equally affect nearby communities so that mutual aid is not possible (Quarantelli, 2000).
Unlike disasters that impact certain groups or functions within the affected community, catastrophes severely affect every member and aspect of it. In accordance with this definition, legislature in many countries specifies the number of casualties or damages above which an event is considered a catastrophe and countermeasures are initiated.
While this distinction may be of practical use, the increasing number and frequency of severe hazards in the Anthropocene that disrupt social systems, cause substantial damage, and cost human lives while simultaneously initiating widespread discussions, mindset change and, ultimately, cultural transformation call for a new understanding of what a catastrophe is and what distinguishes it from disaster.
Continue reading why catastrophe is likely to become a permanent state and how futures studies and foresight can contribute to coping with it in the next post.
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