Natural hazards are the price we pay for living on an active planet. The tectonic plate subduction producing Japan's rugged Tohoku coast gives rise to earthquakes and tsunamis. Florida's warm sunny weather results from the processes in the ocean and atmosphere that cause hurricanes. The volcanoes that produced Hawaii's spectacular islands sometimes threaten people. Rivers that provide the water for the farms that feed us sometimes flood.
Humans have to live with natural hazards. We describe this challenge in terms of hazards, the natural occurrence of earthquakes or other phenomena, and the risks, or dangers they pose to lives and property. In this formulation, the risk is the product of hazard and vulnerability. We want to assess the hazards - estimate how significant they are - and develop methods to mitigate or reduce the resulting losses.
Hazards are geological facts that are not under human control. All we can do is try to assess them as best we can. In contrast, risks are affected by human actions that increase or decrease vulnerability, such as where people live and how they build. We increase vulnerability by building in hazardous areas, and decrease it by making buildings more hazard resistant. Areas with high hazard can have low risk because few people live there. Areas of modest hazard can have high risk due to large population and poor construction. A disaster occurs when - owing to high vulnerability - a natural event has major consequences for society.
The harm from natural disasters is enormous. On average, about 100,000 people per year are killed by natural disasters, with some disasters - such as the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami - causing many more deaths. Although the actual numbers of deaths in many events, such as the 2010 Haiti earthquake, are poorly known, they are very large.
Economic impacts are even harder to quantify, and various measures are used to try to do so. Disasters cause losses, which are the total negative economic impact. These include direct losses due to destruction of physical assets such as buildings, farmland, forests, etc., and indirect losses that result from the direct losses. Because losses are hard to determine, what is reported is often the cost, which refers to payouts by insurers (called insured losses) or governments to reimburse some of the losses. Thus, the reported cost does not reflect the losses to people who do not receive such payments.
According to the passage, an important distinction between hazards and risks is
(A) risks occur naturally, while hazards arise because of human actions
(B) hazards result from risks, and risks result from vulnerability
(C) hazards can lead to disasters, while risks cannot
(D) hazards are not under human control, while risks usually are
(E) risks are harder to quantify than hazards