Vulnerabilities, not Hazards, Cause Disasters: In tackling disasters, the focus is frequently on an environmental event, such as a tornado or earthquake, which is often termed the hazard. These environmental events, however, are normal and they serve important ecological and societal functions. Examples are a flood fertilizing land and providing water resources plus a windstorm knocking down old trees to provide habitats on the forest floor along with space for new trees to grow. Such events are termed hazards from a human perspective when humans cannot cope with them. They can become disasters, often defined as a situation where a community's ability to cope with an event is surpassed, whether that event is environmental or non-environmental and whether that event is or is not extreme. Hewitt (1997) refers to unnatural hazards suggesting that natural hazards are not natural because they are generally hazardous to only humans - along with human action frequently changing environmental processes to make them more hazardous. An example is engineering a river for navigation and settlement which exacerbates floods (Criss and Shock, 2001; Etkin, 1999). One consequence is that disasters are not confined to situations involving rapid-onset, relatively clearly-defined events, such as earthquakes and tornadoes. Disasters resulting from events which are more diffuse in space and time are also incorporated, such as droughts and epidemics. Conditions which become disastrous but with less clear start and end points are disasters too; for example, glaciation, desertification, sea-level rise, and changes to the climate. Different approaches exist for differentiating amongst events with different onset times and with different clarities of start and end points. Glantz (1994) uses the terms creeping environmental changes and creeping environmental problems to describe ongoing changes which overwhelm a community's ability to cope, such as desertification, salinization of water supplies, and sea-level rise. The potential for damage or harm to occur beyond a community's ability to cope also occurs through low-quality water supply, energy overuse with dependence on non-renewable supplies, and inadequate waste management - which could be termed creeping social changes and creeping social phenomena. Sometimes, population numbers, population densities (including urbanization), and population inequalities (determined through livelihoods, poverty, or entitlements) are highlighted as being the creeping disasters faced. The longer-term processes could also be termed disaster conditions, or disastrous conditions, in contrast to disaster events. Expanding the definition of disaster leads to more political interpretations seated in root causes. Disaster conditions could be interpreted as including a lack of resources available for tackling outside interests which are exploiting local human and material resources or as gender, ethnic, or caste discrimination. Lack of choice, entitlement, or empowerment could be debated as the fundamental disaster conditions, leading to, for example, population growth and population density growth that exacerbate disasters - rather than population numbers being the disaster itself. Incompetence, ignorance, or corruption in failing to implement disaster risk reduction could be considered to be the disaster, rather than the tornado or flood event which kills. How does that inability or disinterest in dealing with normal environmental events arise? Policies and decisions over the long-term have created conditions which often neglect communities perceptions of their own context; which fail to account for building and maintaining abilities to deal with normal events, however extreme; and which in some cases exacerbate an environmental event, such as structural flood defences increasing the depth and velocity of river flows. These conditions include poverty, lack of choice, lack of entitlement, poor governance, selfishness, and apathy, amongst many other factors. Key literature (see Appendix 3, especially Hewitt (1983), Lewis (1999), Oliver-Smith (1986), and Wisner et al. (2004)) agrees that the processes by which these conditions are created involves vulnerability  and that vulnerability leads to disasters much more than normal environmental events. This vulnerability process, rather than being a quantitative snapshot in space and time, is not only about the present state, but is also related to what we have done to ourselves and to others over the long-term; why and how we have done that in order to reach the present state; and how we might change the present state to improve in the future