The Political Ecology of Disasters on Madeira Island: Vulnerability, Adaptation and Risk in the 19th Century

Abstract

The concept of vulnerability allows one to understand the root causes of disasters; yet few studies adopted a historical perspective to assess the vulnerability of societies and regions to natural, biological and anthropic risks. Therefore, this work adopted a historical perspective to evaluate the multidimensional processes that influenced the vulnerability of Madeira to disasters and to identify the strategies adopted by the Madeiran society to mitigate disaster risk on the island.
The principles of political ecology were adopted in order to examine vulnerability while documental analysis methods were chosen to collect and analyze the primary and secondary data sources. This study concluded that the disasters that occurred in Madeira in the 19th century resulted from the complex interaction between natural, biological and antropic hazards and the various vulnerabilities associated with the Madeiran society, that resulted from political, economic, social, demographic and environmental processes.
The bureaucratic, remote, and inefficient system of political administration of Madeira, its economic dependence on a monoculture of exportation and the feudal social structure that existed at that time made the island and its society vulnerable to disasters and dimishished their capacity to adapt to a geography of risk. Furthermore, these factors limited the ability of the Madeirans to prepare for, cope with, and recover from the disasters that took place in the 19th century, such as flash-floods, epidemics and famines. The identification of various adaptive methods and practices developed by the Madeirans, like control of ecological factors (poios and levadas), land use patterns, management of natural resources and structural and non-structural disaster mitigation, were insufficient to counteract the vulnerabilities that were being created, which explains the historical record of disaster on the island in the 19th century. This work also concluded that the vulnerability of Madeira in the 19th century resulted from vulnerabilities that were established since the settlement of the island in the 15th century that were propagated throughout the course of time, but also from vulnerabilities inherent to the Madeiran society of the 19th century.
It is critical to stress that the vulnerability of Madeira to disasters was not only influenced by processes that took place on the island, but also from national and global dynamics. According to these findings, we made several recommendations that are useful for the present governance and management of disaster risk on the island.

Keywords

Disaster; Vulnerability; Adaptation; Political Ecology; Risk; Temporal Dimension; Spatial Scale; Historical Approach; Madeira Island.