Challenges associated with creeping disasters in disaster risk science and practice: Considering disaster onset dynamics

This paper aims to deepen understanding of disaster temporalities by examining famine as a prime example of a slow‑onset, "creeping" disaster. It seeks to highlight how gradually emerging impacts create distinct analytical and operational challenges that are often overlooked in disaster research.

The paper concludes that famines, as one example of how creeping disasters produce distinct dynamics, demand that we allow for such nuances and temporal perspectives not only in root cause analyses but also in how impacts are experienced and managed. The lived experience of famine disasters is temporally stretched and so are necessarily responses to famine. Among other things, the very existence of such disasters is more likely to be contested as unaffected groups may organize to deny the reality of a slowly developing creeping disaster, such as a famine (elites often have incentives for denying the existence of an emerging famine).