Laura MacInnis PlanetArk 25 Jan 11;
Natural disasters caused $109 billion in economic damage last year, three times more than in 2009, with Chile and China bearing most of the cost, the United Nations said Monday.
The 8.8-magnitude earthquake that struck Chile in February cost $30 billion. Landslides and floods last summer in China caused $18 billion in losses, data compiled by the Center for Research on the Epidemiology of Disasters (CRED) showed.
Although Haiti's January 12 earthquake was the deadliest event of 2010, killing 316,000 people according to the government in Port-au-Prince, its economic toll was $8 billion. The July-August floods in Pakistan cost $9.5 billion.
Margareta Wahlstrom, the U.N. assistant secretary-general for disaster risk reduction, said fast-developing countries were facing increasing price tags from natural disasters.
"The accumulated wealth that is affected by disaster events is growing," she told a news briefing in Geneva, where most of the U.N.'s emergency and aid operations are based.
Cities are particularly vulnerable to big economic losses when poorly-maintained infrastructure is rattled by earthquakes or exposed to big storms, Wahlstrom said.
"With more extreme weather events, and more earthquakes in urban areas, the state of repair or disrepair in urban areas is really critical," she said.
CLIMATE CHANGE
The most populous cities on earthquake fault lines include Mexico City, New York, Mumbai, Delhi, Shanghai, Kolkata, Jakarta and Tokyo, according to the U.N.'s International Strategy for Disaster Reduction.
Many people also live in parts of urban areas vulnerable to landslides and floods, which are anticipated to occur more often as a result of climate change, Wahlstrom said, also warning of rising risks from "silent events" like droughts.
Of the 373 disasters recorded last year, 22 were in China, 16 were in India and 14 were in the Philippines, CRED said.
The storms, earthquakes, heatwaves and cold snaps affected 207 million people and killed 296,800, according to the data, which does not incorporate an increase of Haiti's death toll announced earlier this month by Prime Minister Jean-Max Bellerive.
The global toll estimates that 55,736 people died from a summer heatwave in Russia which led to crop failures and helped drive up food prices.
It also says 2,968 people were killed in an April earthquake in China and 1,985 died from the Pakistani floods.
The 2009 economic price tag of $34.9 billion was unusually low because of the lack of a major weather or climate event in the period, which nonetheless saw floods and typhoons in Asia and an earthquake in Indonesia.
A major earthquake in China in 2008 caused $86 billion in damage, bringing that year's economic toll to approximately $200 billion. In 2005, the hurricanes that struck the southern United States drove up the global disaster toll to nearly $250 billion.
The economic cost estimates are based on data from national authorities as well as insurance companies including Swiss Re, Munich Re and Lloyd's. CRED is part of the University of Louvain in Belgium and maintains a database of international disasters for the United Nations.
(Editing by Janet Lawrence)
2010 'one of worst' years for disasters: UN
Yahoo News 24 Jan 11;
GENEVA (AFP) – 2010 was one of the worst years on record for natural disasters over the past two decades, leaving nearly 297,000 people dead, research for the United Nations showed on Monday.
The devastating earthquake in Haiti a year ago accounted for about two thirds of the toll, killing more than 222,500 people, according to the Belgium-based Centre for Research on the Epidemiology of Disasters (CRED).
The CRED found that the summer heatwave in Russia was the second deadliest disaster of the year, leaving 55,736 people dead according to figures it compiled from insurers and media reports of official sources.
The year was "one of the worst in decades in terms of the number of people killed and in terms of economic losses," Margareta Wahlstroem, UN special representative for disaster risk reduction, told journalists.
"These figures are bad, but could be seen as benign in years to come," she said, pointing to the impact of unplanned growth of urban areas, environmental degradation and climate change.
The economic cost of the 373 major disasters recorded in 2010 reached 109 billion dollars, headed by an estimated 30 billion dollars in damage caused by the powerful earthquake that struck Chile in February.
The earthquake unleashed a tsunami that swept away villages and claimed most of the 521 dead.
Summer floods and landslides in China caused an estimated 18 billion dollars in damage, while floods in Pakistan cost 9.5 billion dollars, according to the CRED's annual study.
Although impoverished Haiti is still struggling to recover from the quake that devastated much of the capital, Port-au-Prince, it ranked lower down the global economic scale with an estimated eight billion dollars in losses.
Asians accounted for 89 percent of the 207 million people affected by disasters worldwide last year, the CRED said.
Disaster Risk Reduction Critical After Deadliest Year in Decades
Environmental News Service 24 Jan 11;
WASHINGTON, DC, January 24, 2011 (ENS) - Recognizing "increasing disaster risks due to climate change and rapid urban development," the World Bank and South Korea's National Emergency Management Agency on Friday signed an agreement to strengthen cooperation, and facilitate international partnership for disaster risk reduction and climate change adaptation.
"We embark on a longer term partnership for reducing natural disaster risks faced by disaster prone countries in Asia and Pacific," said Dr. Yeon-Soo Park, NEMA's administrator.
Park said a Centre of Excellence will be created in Korea "for supporting countries on disaster risk reduction." The partners also will create a web-based regional platform for disaster risk reduction and climate change adaptation.
James Adams, the World Bank's vice president for East Asia and the Pacific, said the partnership "creates new opportunities for utilizing Korea's superior experience in disaster risk reduction and climate change adaptation and sharing it with other disaster prone countries in the region while offering a platform for Korea and the World Bank to jointly strengthen their assistance in the field."
The Asia Pacific region is extremely vulnerable to the impacts of natural disasters. In East Asia and Pacific alone, over the past two decades, floods, typhoons and earthquakes have affected two million people, killing nearly 90,000 and causing damages of more than US$151 billion.
This kind of action is needed urgently in view of the fact that last year the world experienced the highest number of disaster-related casualties in at least two decades, the United Nations' top disaster reduction official said today at UN headquarters in New York.
"Unless we act now, we will see more and more disasters due to unplanned urbanization and environmental degradation. And weather-related disasters are sure to rise in the future, due to factors that include climate change," said Margareta Wahlstrom, who heads the UN International Strategy for Disaster Reduction, the UN body that coordinates efforts to achieve reduction in disaster losses and build resilient nations and communities.
Some 373 natural disasters claimed the lives of more than 296,800 people last year, affecting nearly 208 million people and costing nearly $110 billion, according to annual data compiled by the Centre for Research on the Epidemiology of Disasters, CRED, of the Universite catholique de Louvain in Belgium, Wahlstrom said.
The January 12, 2010 earthquake in Haiti killed more than 222,500 people, while the Russian summer heat wave caused about 56,000 fatalities, making these events the two deadliest of the year.
"These figures are bad, but could be seen as benign in years to come," said Wahlstrom, who also serves as UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon's Special Representative for Disaster Risk Reduction.
"It's critical for local governments, city leaders and their partners to incorporate climate change adaptation in urban planning," Wahlstrom said, stressing that disaster risk reduction is no longer optional.
CRED's data shows that for the first year, the Americas were the world's worst affected continents in terms of fatalities, with 75 percent of total deaths caused by the earthquake in Haiti.
Europe was the region with the second highest number of deaths, with the heat wave in Russia accounting for nearly a fifth of 2010's total fatalities.
Other extreme climate events in Europe included Storm Xynthia last February, floods in France in June and the extreme winter conditions all over Europe throughout December.
Asia experienced fewer disaster-related deaths with 4.7 percent of total fatalities, but remained the region most prone to natural disasters. An estimated 89 percent of the total number of people affected by natural disasters last year resided in Asia.
Five of the 10 most deadly disasters occurred in China, Pakistan, and Indonesia. Earthquakes killed almost 3,000 people in China in April and 530 people in Indonesia in October.
Between May and August, floods killed more than 1,500 people in China, and another 1,765 were killed by mudslides, landslides or rock fall triggered by heavy rainfall and floods in August.
Nearly 2,000 people died in Pakistan's massive floods. Flood-related destruction in Pakistan was estimated at $9.5 billion.
Floods and landslides during the summer in China are estimated to have cost $18 billion in losses
The Haiti earthquake caused damage worth $8 billion, according to the CRED data.
The costliest event in 2010, however, was the earthquake in Chile in February, with damages valued at $30 billion.
The other two years when natural disasters caused higher losses were 2005, when damages from Hurricanes Katrina, Rita and Wilma alone amounted to $139 billion; and 2008, when the earthquake in Sichuan, China, caused $86 billion worth of damages, a figure than brought the total losses for that year to about $200 billion.
