Environmental Health: Analysis of Human-Caused Disasters and Impacts

This essay examines the significant health impacts of human-caused disasters, including pollution, oil spills, and terrorism, with a focus on their environmental consequences in both the short and long term. It explores how environmental changes have historically affected human lives and values, leading to migrations and lifestyle changes. The essay analyzes global responses to these disasters, highlighting the often underwhelming reactions due to political dynamics, especially from major polluting nations. It delves into the effects of pollution on human health, particularly in the 20th and 21st centuries, and discusses the short, medium, and long-term outcomes. The essay references specific examples like industrial air pollution, the Sayano-Shushenskaya HPP accident, oil spills in the Gulf of Mexico, and the Fukushima-1 nuclear disaster to illustrate the role of human factors and technological hazards. The essay also touches upon sustainability, the increasing risk of accidents in large technical systems, and the accelerated growth in man-made disasters, concluding with a comparison of their destructive potential to military-political emergencies. The essay also references several academic papers.

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Introduction
Human caused disasters are caused by the making or error of a man. They include
dumping of waste, oil spillage and sometimes terrorism. All these are human caused disasters
that have great environmental influence and impact in both long and short term periods. Long
in memorial, environmental changes have affected the way people live and the things that
people value. The consequence is people have migrated or changed their ways of living due
to great environmental impacts (Buse, & Hawkes, 2015). The global response to human
caused disasters sometimes has been underwhelming especially due to political power plays
from nations who are superpowers and are the greatest polluters of the environment. Human
health has been affected over the years of pollution especially in the twentieth and twenty
first centuries.
Global responses
Until in recent past, the global phenomena of environmental pollution has been
treated casually. It has been taken as local while governments have not organized their
responses to incorporate government policies for creation of avenues to deal with human
made disasters. In the beginning of twenty first century when human made disasters were
getting out of hand, the global community attempted to put measures to curb this on a global
scale. These were both long term, medium term and long term factors affecting the
environment. The world’s most industrious countries are the greatest emitters of toxic gases
that are now causing global warming and change in climatic pattern. This has caused hunger
and drought in Africa, glaciers collapsing affecting the natural habitats of animals like the
polar bears and increase in human health conditions such as cancer. Companies in some of

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these countries like China release toxic waste and air to the environment without and
concerns and are not taking keen interest on reducing this (Kieny, et al,2017)..
Oil spilage in mediteranean
Short, Medium and Long-term Outcomes
The short term response to global response to in human made disasters are key
implementation for governments all across the world like reducing toxic level and coming up
with policies that affect the same. By the late 80’s most of the governments were building
gabions and protecting human activity from further damaging the environment causing man-
made disasters (Lim, et al,2016).. technical and labor resources that could be used for the
development of the economy and the social sphere. This puts forward among the priority
tasks the development and implementation of effective measures to minimize the inevitable
damage from natural disasters and concentrate efforts on their possible prevention.
Therefore, the forecast and prevention of natural disasters in the whole globe are
becoming a concern of all countries, regardless of their economic development. The
International Committee for Global Geological and Environmental Changes “SEOSILMS”
has calculated that the economic damage from natural disasters in 2011 could exceed the one
trillion dollar level.

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Air Pollution caused by industries
Adoption
An example of this is include; the accident at the Sayano-Shushenskaya HPP in
August 2009, the disaster with a large-scale oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico in May 2010 and
the radiation accident at the Fukushima-1 nuclear pwer plant in March 2011 . In this type of
disasters, an increasing role the human factor begins to play, which is manifested in
engineering errors, personnel errors (Patel, et al,2018). According to the degree of potential
technological hazards, it is possible to distinguish objects of the nuclear, chemical,
metallurgical and mining industries, unique engineering structures (dams, racks, oil and gas
storages), transport systems transporting dangerous goods and large masses of people, main
gas, oil and product pipelines. . This also includes dangerous objects of the defense complex,
large warehouses of conventional and chemical weapons.
Sustainability
The reason is that scientific and technical progress not only contributes to increasing
productivity and improving working conditions, increasing material well-being and the
intellectual potential of society, but also leads to an increase in the risk of accidents of large
technical systems (Schmidt, Gostin, & Emanuel, 2015). This is due to the increase in their

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number and complexity, the growth of unit capacities of units at industrial and energy
facilities, and their territorial concentration.
Conclusion
As a result, in recent years there has been a constant accelerated growth in the number
of accidents and man-made disasters and their magnitude. It should be emphasized that today
the destructive potential of major technological disasters has become comparable to the threat
of military-political emergencies. As an example, the world famous accidents at Three Mile
Island nuclear power plants in the USA and Chernobyl in Ukraine, at chemical plants in
Seveso (Italy), Bhopal (India) and others can be cited (World Health Organization, 2016).
This is due to a number of reasons, and above all, the progressive urbanization of the
territories, the increase in the population density of the Earth, and as a result, the
anthropogenic impact and the observed global climate change on Earth.
References
Buse, K., & Hawkes, S. (2015). Health in the sustainable development goals: ready for a
paradigm shift?. Globalization and health, 11(1), 13.
Kieny, M. P., Bekedam, H., Dovlo, D., Fitzgerald, J., Habicht, J., Harrison, G., ... & Siddiqi,
S. (2017). Strengthening health systems for universal health coverage and sustainable
development. Bulletin of the World Health Organization, 95(7), 537.

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Lim, S. S., Allen, K., Bhutta, Z. A., Dandona, L., Forouzanfar, M. H., Fullman, N., ... &
Kinfu, Y. (2016). Measuring the health-related Sustainable Development Goals in 188
countries: a baseline analysis from the Global Burden of Disease Study 2015. The
Lancet, 388(10053), 1813-1850.
Patel, V., Saxena, S., Lund, C., Thornicroft, G., Baingana, F., Bolton, P., ... & Herrman, H.
(2018). The Lancet Commission on global mental health and sustainable
development. The Lancet, 392(10157), 1553-1598.
Schmidt, H., Gostin, L. O., & Emanuel, E. J. (2015). Public health, universal health coverage,
and Sustainable Development Goals: can they coexist?. The Lancet, 386(9996), 928-
930.
World Health Organization. (2016). World health statistics 2016: monitoring health for the
SDGs sustainable development goals. World Health Organization.