A Natural disaster is an event that occurs naturally without any human influences causing it. Whereas a human disaster is an event that was influenced by human activity, making the impacts to people and the environment worse.
Natural disasters are due to the nature of the disaster that cannot be changed or reduced in any way. One factor that supports this is the magnitude of the earthquake. Eg. Haiti earthquake of 2011 had a magnitude of 7.2 on the Richter scale. whereas Japans was a magnitude of 9.0. The higher magnitude would cause greater impacts such as destruction of infrastructure and greater deaths. This is proven as Japan had 18,000 lives lost. Therefore showing that the nature and physical aspects of a disaster is what influences the impacts of the event.
However, it can be argued that human factors have more influence on impacts of an event due to Haiti having a greater number of deaths overall due to being an LEDC and so lower economically developed. Whereas Japan is a MEDC. This means that there may be less technology to attempt to mitigate the impacts to the people such as warning systems being set up and the level of medical care and education. Eg. Haiti had an overall death toll of 60,000 that died with 350,000 infected with cholera due to poor sewage treatment and hygiene. The human activity caused the effects of the disaster to be worse due to contamination of the local drinking river of which people drank and washed in. compared to the 10,000 that died in Japans earthquake, it suggests that it is in fact a human disaster rather than a natural disaster.
Another example for support that events are natural disasters is the fact that attempts to reduce the impacts were already put into place in Japan. This was shown by the preparedness of the country to earthquakes and tsunamis as they are frequent in Japan. 40% of japans coastline already had a 10m