Geopolitics of Natural Disasters: How Countries and International Organizations Respond to Natural Disasters and Their Implications for Geopolitics

 

Natural Disasters As A Political Force In A Hotter Century

Earthquakes, floods, storms, fires and droughts have always been part of human history. What is new in the twenty first century is the way these events are stacking up, colliding with climate change, mass urban growth and fragile politics. The result is not only more damage and more headlines. It is a slow reshaping of power relations between states, regions and classes. Disasters decide which governments survive, which borders harden, which cities are rebuilt and who gets to move first when land becomes unlivable.

A Planet Where Disasters Are No Longer Exceptional

Climate science is very clear on one point. The physical climate system has shifted and is still shifting. The latest assessment reports show that human driven warming is intensifying the water cycle and bringing more frequent and more intense heat waves, heavy rainfall, floods, droughts and tropical cyclones in many regions (IPCC 2021, IPCC 2022, NASA 2024). Assessments on adaptation add that disasters powered by climate change are already worse than scientists expected a decade ago, and that risk will grow even under ambitious emission cuts (WWF 2023).

Recent attribution studies on catastrophic monsoon floods and cyclones in Asia show what this means in practice. Warmer oceans and air masses have supercharged rainfall, turning intense storms into killers that drown cities, displace millions and cause damage measured in many billions of dollars (World Weather Attribution 2025). Disaster risk is no longer a stable background. It moves with every fraction of a degree.

At the same time, more people live in harm’s way. Urbanisation has pushed hundreds of millions into river deltas, coastal plains and hillsides. Megacities sprawl into flood plains and seismic zones. Informal settlements grow where land is cheap and regulations weak. When heavy rain falls on paved ground and badly drained neighbourhoods, floods that might once have spread over fields now rush through streets and subway systems. When storms hit reclaimed land and sinking coastal districts, the poorest residents often live closest to the water.

Sociologists like Ulrich Beck describe this as a risk society, where modernisation produces new kinds of manufactured risk that are global, uneven and hard to predict (Beck 1992). Climate change and natural disasters fit this picture. They are not simply acts of nature. They are shaped by decisions about where to build, what to protect and whose lives can be exposed.

Political ecologists push the argument further. They note that the people most exposed to cyclones, floods and droughts are often those who contributed least to greenhouse gas emissions and who have the least voice in planning and reconstruction. Floods in Pakistan, cyclones in Mozambique, drought in the Horn of Africa and storms in the Caribbean all follow this pattern. Disaster risk becomes another expression of global inequality.

How States Prepare And How They Fail

Most states now speak the language of resilience. They adopt national disaster risk reduction strategies, strengthen early warning systems, and talk about building back better. The Sendai Framework for Disaster Risk Reduction, adopted in Sendai in two thousand fifteen, sets out global targets to reduce mortality, economic loss and damage to critical infrastructure by two thousand thirty, with priorities that include understanding risk, strengthening governance, investing in resilience and improving preparedness and recovery (UNDRR 2015, UNDRR 2021).

Some states have used repeated catastrophes to transform their systems. Japan has woven earthquake and tsunami risk into almost every layer of policy, from strict building standards and dense monitoring networks to drills, public education and a culture of constant readiness. Bangladesh has dramatically reduced cyclone death tolls over the past decades through a mix of cyclone shelters, community volunteers and early warning systems, even as storms themselves remain strong.

Elsewhere, preparedness sits on paper. Budgets for risk reduction do not match the rhetoric. Political leaders favour visible reconstruction projects after disasters rather than invisible investments before they hit. Corruption or patronage distort building codes and land use plans. When disasters arrive, response becomes chaotic, and trust in government erodes.

Security thinking is also changing. As climate linked disasters threaten coastal bases, supply chains and fragile states, defence establishments start to treat climate risk as a national security concern. War colleges publish reports on climate security. Militaries rehearse large scale humanitarian operations and stabilisation missions after storms and drought driven conflicts. That shift can bring resources into disaster management, but it can also militarise response and sideline local communities and civil agencies.

Aid, Coordination And The Politics Of Help

No major disaster remains purely local for long. Governments request assistance, or sometimes refuse it. International media arrive. Foreign search and rescue teams, medical staff and logisticians deploy. Cargo planes unload tents, food and water treatment systems. Charities launch appeals. The effect can be life saving. It can also be messy, political and unequal.

The United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs exists precisely because ad hoc responses became unmanageable. OCHA shares information, mobilises emergency teams, and convenes donors and agencies so that relief is more coherent and gaps are filled faster (OCHA 2024, OCHA 2016). The same system struggles with chronic underfunding. Recent appeals have been met at historically low levels, which means millions of people who qualify for assistance are not reached (AP 2025).

Disaster response also intersects with sovereignty. Governments may bar foreign militaries from their airspace or ports, limit access to affected regions, or insist that all aid is channelled through state agencies. After Cyclone Nargis in Myanmar, the former junta restricted access for foreign aid workers, fearing political interference. In other cases, governments invite foreign forces in, using disaster response to signal alliances.

For donors, disasters are moments of visibility. Rapid deployment of field hospitals or naval ships projects an image of competence and generosity. States use relief missions to deepen ties with allies, open doors in new regions and counter the influence of rivals. In the Pacific, for instance, competing offers of assistance and climate finance from larger powers are part of a broader contest for influence among small island states.

Non governmental organisations sit inside this web of politics. Some maintain strict neutrality and focus on needs. Others are tied to faith groups, ideological movements or foreign policy agendas. Local civil society organisations often know the terrain and communities best, yet large international actors can overshadow them.

Disaster Diplomacy And Disaster Capitalism

The phrase disaster diplomacy describes situations where shared suffering opens political doors that were closed before. The best known example is Greek and Turkish relations after the nineteen ninety nine earthquakes. Strong quakes hit first Turkey and then Greece within a few weeks. Each country sent rescue teams and aid to the other. Public sympathy softened long standing hostility, and diplomats used that opening to pursue rapprochement (Ker Lindsay 2000, Koukis 2016, Kayhan Pusane and Ilgit 2024).

Similar dynamics appeared after the Indian Ocean tsunami of two thousand four, where the disaster contributed to peace talks between the Indonesian government and insurgents in Aceh. In theory, shared disasters can remind rival elites that they inhabit the same physical world, dependent on the same seas, rivers and tectonic plates.

The same events can also deepen divisions. If parties perceive aid as unfairly distributed, or suspect that relief is used to reward loyalists and punish opponents, frustration can feed conflict. In Syria, competing authorities and outside powers turned humanitarian access into a bargaining chip during civil war. In many internal conflicts, control over aid routes becomes part of military strategy.

Naomi Klein popularised another concept, disaster capitalism, to describe how elites and corporations use moments of shock to push through privatisation, deregulation and other reforms that face more resistance in calmer times (Klein 2007, Klein 2017, Holmes 2008, Hardt 2007). She traces how post tsunami reconstruction in Sri Lanka cleared coastal land of fishing communities for tourism, and how rebuilding after Hurricane Katrina in New Orleans favoured developers and charter schools over previous residents. This lens reminds us that disasters redistribute land, contracts and debt. They can become opportunities for accumulation by dispossession.

From this angle, the geopolitics of natural disasters is about more than flags painted on aid boxes. It is about whose construction firms get the big contracts, whose consultants design new planning rules, whose investors move into newly cleared zones and whose people are pushed to marginal land.

Displacement, Borders And Climate Justice

When coasts erode, deltas sink, glaciers melt and storms repeat, people move. Some evacuate temporarily and return. Others never go back. The numbers of internally displaced persons due to weather and climate related disasters already reach tens of millions each year, and projections under high warming scenarios point to far larger flows later in the century.

Cross border displacement is politically sensitive. International law offers only partial protection. The term climate refugee has no fixed legal meaning, and people fleeing storms or drought often do not fit neatly into the categories of refugee or labour migrant. Yet their movement raises classic diplomatic questions. How many people will a neighbouring country accept after a major flood. On what terms. How long can they stay. Will they be allowed to work. Who pays for housing, schools and clinics.

Negotiations over these issues connect to broader fights over loss and damage, the term used in climate negotiations for unavoidable harms from climate impacts that cannot be fully adapted to. Vulnerable states argue that those who have emitted the most greenhouse gases have a responsibility to contribute to funds for reconstruction, relocation and risk management. Industrialised countries have historically resisted strong liability language but have recently accepted the creation of new loss and damage funding arrangements in principle. The shape of those mechanisms, and the extent to which they address displacement, is still contested.

Climate justice movements insist that people whose homes become uninhabitable because of sea level rise or repeated storms should not be treated as supplicants begging for charity. In their view, they are owed support as a matter of justice. That logic, if it ever fully enters international law and practice, would represent a major shift in the geopolitics of disasters.

Future Pressures And Possible Pathways

Looking forward, several trends pull in different directions.

On one side, scientific projections point to increased frequency and intensity of many types of weather and climate extremes as warming continues, with cascading impacts on food systems, water security, health and infrastructure (IPCC 2021, IPCC 2022, NASA 2024, IPCC 2022 impacts summary). More disasters will occur in quick succession or simultaneously in different regions. Governments will face overlapping crises that stretch their response capacity and financial resources. Debt crises in vulnerable countries will make it harder to invest in resilience.

On another side, frameworks like the Sendai agreement push states and cities to integrate risk reduction into development planning, from early warning systems to ecosystem based solutions such as mangrove restoration and floodplain management (UNDRR 2015, UNDRR 2021). Better forecasting, digital communication, local knowledge and social protection schemes can limit loss of life even when hazards intensify.

The balance between these forces is not predetermined. It is shaped by choices. States can continue to subsidise fossil fuels, allow construction in high risk zones and treat each disaster as an isolated emergency. Or they can move risk reduction and climate adaptation into the core of economic policy, shift investment toward resilient infrastructure and nature based protection, and strengthen social safety nets so that disasters do not push people permanently into poverty.

Internationally, there is a similar fork. Major powers can treat disaster response as a field for competition, use aid to reward allies and undermine rivals, and hoard access to reconstruction contracts and new technologies. Or they can accept that a planet with more frequent and severe disasters is ungovernable without some baseline of solidarity and burden sharing.

Disaster diplomacy can either remain a brief warm glow after tragedy, quickly displaced by old hostilities, or it can be cultivated deliberately. Regular joint exercises, shared early warning systems across borders, regional risk pools and cross border river basin management are all ways to turn shared vulnerability into institutionalised cooperation.

Living With A Hotter And More Violent Planet

Natural disasters will not disappear. With further warming already locked in, many types of hazard will intensify. What can change is how societies distribute risk and how they react. That is where geopolitics enters.

A world in which rich countries fortify their borders, export risk through supply chains and leave poorer neighbours to face storms and floods alone will be a world of growing bitterness and instability. A world in which states accept that their security depends on the resilience of others, and that justice is part of stability, will look different.

Every major earthquake, cyclone, drought or fire now carries two stories at once. One is about geology and physics. The other is about power, responsibility and choice. How governments answer the second story, together and separately, will decide whether the age of climate charged disasters becomes mainly a story of repeated ruin, or a difficult but shared project of survival on a damaged planet.

References

• IPCC. Two thousand twenty one. Climate Change Two thousand twenty one The Physical Science Basis. Contribution of Working Group One to the Sixth Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. Geneva.
• IPCC. Two thousand twenty two. Climate Change Two thousand twenty two Impacts Adaptation and Vulnerability. Contribution of Working Group Two to the Sixth Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. Geneva.
• NASA. Two thousand twenty four. Extreme Weather and Climate Change. Washington DC.
• World Wide Fund for Nature. Two thousand twenty three. Is Climate Change Increasing the Risk of Disasters. Gland.
• United Nations Office for Disaster Risk Reduction. Two thousand fifteen. Sendai Framework for Disaster Risk Reduction Two thousand fifteen to Two thousand thirty. Geneva.
• United Nations Office for Disaster Risk Reduction. Two thousand twenty one. The Sendai Framework Monitor and Progress Review. Geneva.
• United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs. Two thousand twenty four. What We Do. Geneva and New York.
• Associated Press. Two thousand twenty five. United Nations Aid Coordination Agency Cuts Appeal After Funding Falls. New York.
• Ker Lindsay, James. Two thousand. Greek Turkish Rapprochement The Impact of Disaster Diplomacy.
• Koukis, Theophanis. Two thousand sixteen. Greece Turkey Disaster Diplomacy from Disaster Risk Reduction to Reconciliation.
• Kayhan Pusane, Özlem, and Asli Ilgit. Two thousand twenty four. International Relations Amidst Disasters Turkish and Greek Perceptions in the Earthquakes of Nineteen Ninety Nine and Two thousand twenty three.
• Klein, Naomi. Two thousand seven. The Shock Doctrine The Rise of Disaster Capitalism. New York.
• Holmes, Stephen. Two thousand eight. Free Marketeering Naomi Klein on Disaster Capitalism. London Review of Books.
• Hardt, Michael. Two thousand seven. The Violence of Capital. New Left Review.
• Beck, Ulrich. Nineteen ninety two. Risk Society Toward a New Modernity. London.