There is no such thing as a natural disaster: why resilience starts with recognizing vulnerability

Over the last few decades, our societies have been exposed to increasing levels of pressure. As geopolitical, environmental, and economic tensions rise, we have moved from one crisis to the next. As a result, isolated disruptions have gradually evolved into a state where ‘crisis’ has become a structural condition. It is the context within which societies must continuously navigate^{1, 2}. In response, resilience and disaster risk management have become essential to the functioning of modern societies. From infrastructure and healthcare to business continuity, nearly all systems depend on their ability to withstand shocks².

Yet in practice, action often follows disruption rather than anticipating it³. This reveals an uncomfortable paradox, as crises are not external events that affect us, but are shaped through our inadequate and insufficient systems, policies, and behaviours that make us vulnerable^{4, 5}. As both contributors to and victims of these dynamics, we are responsible for addressing them as well. The question becomes: where do our vulnerabilities lie and why do we continue to overlook them? More importantly, how can we reshape our response so that building resilience is not merely a necessity to withstand crises, but becomes an opportunity to create stronger and more adaptive communities⁶?

Crisis as the new baseline of our societies

Throughout history, our societies have been faced with several disasters in the form of epidemics, floods, and conflict. However, over the last few decades, the context in which these disasters occur has significantly changed⁶. Today, multiple structural pressures, such as climate change, environmental degradation, rapid urbanisation, geopolitical tensions, and population growth, are both increasing the likelihood and intensity of crises^{6, 7, 2}. At the same time, these risks no longer exist in isolation. Instead, they have become deeply interconnected, amplifying one another and creating cascading effects across systems⁸. For example, climate-induced droughts can undermine livelihoods and drive migration, while geopolitical tensions can disrupt energy supply, both creating cascading effects across systems.

This shift is reflected in the Global Risks Report 2026, published by the World Economic Forum, which describes an increasingly unstable world shaped by geo-economic confrontation, polarization, and declining trust. Rather than a landscape with isolated risks, societies are now navigating a ‘polycrisis’, in which multiple crises interact and cannot be managed separately^{8, 9, 10}.

As a result, crises are no longer exceptional events but are becoming a persistent condition, sometimes described as ‘permacrisis’, referring to the situation in which vital interests of society are affected or are at risk of being affected^{11, 12}.

Crisis, disaster, and vulnerability

As crises become more continuous, the risk grows that the disruptions caused by disasters exceed the normal functioning of societies^{12, 13}. Yet, in defining this risk, crisis and disasters are often still presented as external effects that simply overcome us. Floods, earthquakes, ecological degradation, pandemics, and conflicts are commonly framed as shocks that demand immediate relief.

A growing body of critical research challenges this framing and the idea of the ‘natural disaster’, which suggests that events lie outside of human control, thereby absolving responsibility to prepare and reduce risks^{14, 15}. Instead, this research argues that while some of these events may involve physical phenomena, such as fire, flood, or earthquakes, they only become disasters when they collide with social conditions that create vulnerability⁴. These include inadequate infrastructure, weak institutions, social inequality, poor preparedness, and forms of social disadvantage that influence exposure to risk. A flood, heatwave, or tsunami becomes disastrous not only because of rising water, extreme temperatures, or seismic activity, but because people are exposed in ways that make harm more likely¹⁶. The broad disparities in the effects experienced during the Covid-19 crisis offer a clear example of this. The disproportionate impact on regions such as Latin America, one of the most unequal regions in the world, shows that these outcomes were rooted in structural inequalities that discriminated by age, gender, and income¹⁷. At the same time, many hazards we describe as ‘natural’ are themselves increasingly shaped by human activity. Human-induced climate change, for example, is intensifying the frequency and severity of extreme weather events such as droughts, floods, and wildfires¹⁸.

Disasters, and the pressure and effects of crises, are therefore shaped by decisions made long before the visible crisis begins. In this sense, disasters and the increased exposure to crises, reveal our vulnerabilities and the choices made as a society.^{3, 7}

Despite our increased understanding of the social dimensions of crisis and disasters, our response often remains directed towards immediate relief or recovery after the event, drawing attention away from longer-term vulnerabilities that lie at their core^{3, 19}.

So why do we keep creating vulnerable systems?

As crises start with vulnerable systems, addressing them requires strengthening and the improvement of our current systems. Resilience, the ability to withstand disruption, has become an important measure of the efforts to make our systems more inclusive and better prepared for potential shocks¹⁷.

However, while shocks after disasters and crises have led to increased insights on weaknesses and factors limiting resilience, the lessons learned and scientific data gathered quickly seem to fade^{17, 20, 21}. Several factors explain why information alone is not enough to drive long-term action, including short-term thinking, fragmented responsibility, and the effect of normalcy bias.

Short-term thinking before and after crisis

One of the biggest difficulties in building long-term resilience is our focus on short-term thinking and efficient action rather than responding to long-term crises facing humanity^{5, 22}. Ronald Wright, author of the 2004 book on A Short History of Progress, compares today’s human beings to 21st century software running on 50,000 year-old hardware. Through evolution, our minds have evolved to handle immediate threats and problems instead of long-term disruptive and enduring change. We tend to recognize a threat only when it becomes imminent, by which point it may already be too late, leaving us to address it at far greater cost. This can be problematic in relation to the complex crises that our society currently faces²². Furthermore, people tend to overlook the influence of chance, leading them to falsely assume that the future will unfold the same way as the past^{22, 5}.

Fragmented responsibility leads to inaction

One of the major obstacles to building resilience is fragmentation. Responsibilities for risk management are often dispersed across various private and public institutions, sectors, and layers of government that lack sufficient coordination and often hold misaligned priorities, unclear responsibilities and limited mechanisms for collaboration^{23, 24}. This fragmentation makes coordination more difficult, making the prevention and anticipation measures needed to effectively respond to crises increasingly difficult to achieve²³. Furthermore, as responsibility becomes diffused, people become less likely to act when they believe someone else will, which is referred to as the ‘bystander effect’²⁵. In this context, inaction is not the result of carelessness, but of assumed responsibility that someone else will intervene. As a result, fragmentation does not just complicate coordination, it actively reinforces inaction as responsibility is shared but not owned²⁵. The complexity that is created disrupts stable and causal connections and functions as a main pitfall for risk management.

Normalcy bias

Bias is formed through evolutionary history to provide humans with survival advantages, such as mental shortcuts and heuristics to make information-dense today’s complex environments more manageable. However, in this case, bias, and specifically what is referred to as normalcy bias also has its implications^{26, 29}. It refers to the tendency in facing threats or crises, to underestimate the likelihood of disasters and assume that life will continue as usual, allowing people to convince themselves that these events are unlikely to happen, or postponed, even when the risks or potential disruptions are clearly understood^{5, 29, 26}. The emphasis on the exceptional nature of Covid-19 shows that crises are still largely perceived as deviations from normality rather than structural possibilities²⁸. In today’s world, this normalcy bias can be particularly dangerous, as the scale and complexity of systemic risks mean that by the time we recognize that normal conditions have broken down and begin to act, it may already have triggered a trickle-down effect into our other systems^{26, 27}.

Only when external dangers become apparent, severe, or proximate enough to cross a threshold, normalcy bias is pushed aside. This explains why despite the knowledge on the potential of a crisis leading to disasters, we hold back from acting²⁶.

Structural vulnerability

While behavioural theories help explain how individuals perceive and respond to risks, vulnerabilities are not only the result of individual decision-making. Structural conditions, unsafe conditions, and dynamic pressures often play an important role in producing vulnerabilities within society⁴. These include power imbalances, unequal access to resources, livelihood strains, weak governance, constraining people’s capacity to cope with crises that ultimately expose existing vulnerabilities and determine the effects of crises on human populations^{16, 30, 31}. Therefore, vulnerability is not only shaped by behavioural factors, but also by the structural conditions that determine how risks are distributed across society. As such, disasters are not merely natural events, but emerge from the interaction between hazards, human responses, and the structural conditions that shape vulnerability.

Designing for resilience

As the challenges (and opportunities) facing our society are increasing in amount and complexity, the need to address them becomes more urgent²². We are aware of both the challenges we face and the actions that make and keep us vulnerable, so the question becomes: how can we act in the face of a future with increased exposure to crises?

While we cannot change human psychology, we can change the design of our systems around it²². This includes both systems that contribute to the emergence of crises and the systems affected by them. As this article has shown, crises are shaped by vulnerability and responses constrained by human behaviour, requiring more than awareness alone^{22, 23, 26, 16}.

It requires a shift from reactive crisis response toward a combination of long-term anticipation and resilience, addressing the behavioural and structural conditions that produce vulnerability^{22, 31}. Anticipation focuses on preventing or reducing risks before they materialize, by recognizing signals early, thinking probabilistically, and preparing for uncertainty and ways to deal with possible effects of disasters. Resilience accepts that not all risks can be avoided and focuses on the capacity of systems to absorb shocks under pressure^{12, 22, 32}.

Both approaches depend on long-term, adaptive, and collective action. Resilience cannot be built by a single actor in a linear process, but emerges through coordination between governments, businesses, research institutions, and communities^{12, 17, 33}. This also requires a shift in how risks are communicated. When challenges are framed solely through fear or urgency, they can reinforce short-term reactions or fatigue. Framing them as opportunities for renewal may instead strengthen engagement and collective ownership²². 

Recognizing vulnerability and using it as a starting point for change, instead of a sign of weakness, helps us create systems that are better prepared and more capable of navigating our more complex world. Shall we?

This article is part of The Outside World, ftrprf’s very own research center.

As changemakers, we believe that what happens in the outside world is the most powerful force shaping organizational strategy – and also the most underestimated. To do well, organizations need to understand what’s happening in the outside world. To do significantly better, they need to be aware of what it means for their future, their relations, their strategy, and their impact. We serve as a bridge between society and tailored strategy by analysing societal dynamics, global trends, and shifting public expectations with a multidisciplinary team of international analysts, excellent tooling, sophisticated AI, and a systems approach. This article is part of our second trimester research focus, which centers on resilience.

For more information, please contact theoutsideworld@ftrprf.com.