Air pollution and food security impacts

Public Health

In "Nutrition and Disaster Preparedness: Focusing on Vulnerability, Building Capacities," Wright & Vesala-Husemann (2006) point out that the media over-emphasizes acute and sudden disasters, when chronic and "long-term" disasters can be far more devastating to human communities. Disasters that are chronic are less intense and therefore less newsworthy from a media perspective. Wright & Vesala-Husemann (2006) note that humanitarian aid is sometimes distributed poorly to communities in need because of the media bias. With regards to malnutrition, populations throughout Kenya warrant attention. The dramatic images fed to the public might garner sympathy, but bloated bellies and flies swarming infants are not the only symptoms of widespread malnutrition. Focusing overly much on the sensational images detracts from the vast majority of affected individuals.

Coping ability can be calculated via an analysis that takes into account the following three factors: vulnerability, hazards, and coping. Vulnerability refers to susceptibility to problems; or general risk factors. For example, a family living in a corrugated tin hut is more vulnerable to a hurricane than a family living in a concrete dwelling. An individual residing near a heavy waste-producing factory will be more vulnerable to acquiring certain types of cancer than an individual who resides in a more pristine environment. Hazards refer to the types of problems that might arise in a specific geographic locale -- and those can include environmental issues such as storms or human issues such as war. Coping, finally, refers to the ability to cope with disasters and usually refers to the presence of infrastructure, good governance, and economic resources. It is important to keep in mind that most disasters result of a combination of various factors and are rarely the result of a singular event.

As Wright & Vesala-Husemann (2006) point out, "factors such as prior experience, access to information, and cultural norms" all have a strong impact on an individual's or family's ability to cope with environmental or external problems. Such problems must be viewed with the lenses of politics and cultural realities because disasters impact the politically or economically disenfranchised far more intensely than they impact the privileged.

Self-sufficiency is a major theme throughout the Vesala-Husemann (2006) research. It is inappropriate to provide food and other resources indefinitely because doing so increases unnecessary dependency, reducing the capability of communities to restore themselves. Moreover, there "culturally appropriate or acceptable" methods of resource distribution that should be taken into account. Aid workers must be careful to abstain from projecting foreign values and norms on the vulnerable populations in their time of greatest need.

Disaster itself needs to be defined in ways that are meaningful for resource distribution and for the media as well. A disaster can be defined as a threat, coupled with local vulnerability and the failure of local resources to enable recovery (Vesala-Husemann, 2006).

Part Two