Sian Powell | August 21, 2007
EXTREME natural disasters have become more frequent and their impact more severe, affecting about 250 million people around the world and costing more than $67 billion a year.
Nine in 10 people affected by natural disasters and seven in 10 of those killed by natural disasters since 2000 lived in the APEC region, the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs' Asia and Pacific regional chief, Terje Skavdal, said yesterday.
In an address to an APEC Emergency Management chief executives seminar in Cairns, Mr Skavdal said savage flooding across Asia and parts of South America, Africa and Europe served as a reminder that recent decades had brought a higher rate of extreme disasters. "This was also brought home by the 2004 tsunami and the series of several record storm seasons in the Atlantic and Caribbean," he said.
The Boxing Day 2004 tsunami, which hit 14 countries on two continents, accounted for 37 per cent of all recorded fatalities from natural disasters since 2000, with most of the deaths in APEC states. "Wars, poverty, and disease ... continue to spread human suffering, and there are new risks of mass terrorism and pandemics," Mr Skavdal said. "Nonetheless, the destructiveness of natural phenomena has grown disproportionately."
He said disaster response collaboration had accelerated after the tsunami, particularly in the directly affected region, with strong and growing networks for civil-military collaboration.
Even so, he said, the increased danger of natural disasters required an increased investment in risk reduction, which to date was falling short of agreed targets.
Climate change, population growth, urbanisation, environmental degradation and the rapid transformation of fertile land into desert had all accelerated the likelihood that natural disasters would have a serious impact on people's lives.
"More and more people around the world live in an urban setting, and in Asia, in particular, many urban centres are in earthquake zones or areas vulnerable to flooding," Mr Skavdal said. "Risk management in cities is an especially complex endeavour."
Nevertheless, despite the increased frequency and destructiveness of disasters, the death toll had fallen compared with last century. In the past decade, fewer than one million people died in natural disasters worldwide, compared with three million deaths in the same period 40 years ago.
"It is a tribute to the development of early warning systems and other preparedness efforts taken in your countries and on a regional level," Mr Skavdal said.
