| dc.description.abstract | Natural disasters have a history. The impact of a natural hazard on a society is not just determined by the severity of the hazard but predominantly by the vulnerability and resilience of the people it hits. With the prospect of further global warming, it is crucial that scholars from various disciplines examine such environmental events, whether sudden or slow, and how societies have coped with them. This thesis deals with the long-term patterns of economic and environmental vulnerability in Honduras that precluded the widespread destruction caused by Hurricane Mitch in 1998. The degraded topsoil in much of rural Honduras made this hurricane particularly deadly and destructive because it was washed away by the significant rainfall. I question in this thesis to what extent land tenure has impacted the degradation of the topsoil and thus exposed the disaster vulnerabilities of Honduras. The existing body of disaster literature has mainly focused on the political, economic, social, and demographic developments after World War II. From a longer-term political ecology perspective, I argue that the roots of these vulnerabilities can be found in the historical political and economic relations between Honduras and the Global North that started in the late nineteenth century. The influence that external state and non-state actors have had in Honduras has impacted how Honduran administrations and agricultural producers have dealt with the distribution of agricultural lands and thus with land tenure. Inequalities of land tenure, together with agricultural developments and population growth after World War II, have been central to the deforestation and land degradation in Honduras. | |
