Asian nations 'face greatest natural disaster risk'

Mark Kinver BBC News 15 Aug 12;

Emerging economies in Asia, including India and the Philippines, face the greatest financial risk from natural disasters, an analysis suggests.

The authors based their rankings on nations' economic activity and exposure to natural hazards, such as floods, droughts, earthquakes and cyclones.

The nations' limited ability to recover from disasters left them exposed to severe disruption, they added.

Risk analysis firm Maplecroft compiled the Natural Hazards Risk Atlas.

Last year was deemed to be the most costly 12 months on record for natural disasters, costing US $380bn (£242bn).

The main reason for the spike was the earthquake and tsunami that struck Japan in March 2011, which was estimated to have cost US$210bn.

'Heavily exposed'

The authors said that the world's key growth economies were among those most exposed to risks related to natural hazards.

"China, Mexico, India, Philippines, South Korea, Indonesia, Turkey, Bangladesh and Iran are each heavily exposed to major destructive natural hazards, such as earthquakes, flooding and tropical cyclones," they wrote.

"Businesses operating in, investing in or sourcing from emerging economies are therefore particularly exposed... and need to build their resilience to mitigate the disruption and impact of an event."

Lead author Helen Hodge, an associate director at Maplecroft, said Asian economies - particularly those located in the south-east of the continent - faced a variety of potentially devastating hazards.

"The Pacific Ring of Fire is a belt of seismic risk that draws in Indonesia, Philippines, Japan and Taiwan etc," she told BBC News.

"So that exposes these nations to seismic risk, and high risk from earthquakes, but also - as we saw in Japan - the secondary risk of tsunamis.

"This combined with the hydro-meteorological risks. For example, along the Mekong Delta, we do see very high flood risks.

"There are the drought risks as well when we see Monsoons failing or arriving late.

"It is not really one risk in particular but it is the combination of multiple risks that are prominent in the areas."

Night lights

Ms Hodge explained that in order to create the atlas's maps and rankings, the authors assessed the underlying risk from 12 natural hazards and then compared this with economic output.

"In order to look at economic output, we use a technique where we look at night-time lights, and then distribute economic exposure according to night-time lights," she added.

"This is based on research that shows you tend to get concentrations of economic exposure coinciding with bright lights.

"We then used [Geographic Information System] techniques to effectively map the different data across each other, so where does the seismic risk lie? Where does the tropical cyclone risk lie?"

Although the report identified Japan, the US, China, Taiwan and Mexico as the nations having the highest economic exposure to natural hazards in absolute terms, the authors said the huge economies had the capacity to recover relatively quickly.

This was a result of a high degree of resilience, such as established infrastructure, disaster preparedness and tight building regulations.

"A way to explain how this might differ is by looking at somewhere like the US, where clearly down the west coast and alongside the east coast, you have got major concentrations of economic output hazards - earthquakes on the west, and hurricanes on the east," observed Ms Hodge.

"That alone is going to drive the US into high rankings for absolute economic exposure.

"However, if you look at that as the wider relative economic output - because there are concentrations of economic exposure in places like the mid-west that are not as heavily exposed to this risks - this has a balancing effect."

"[But] when you consider that the Haitian earthquake in 2010, if you look at the proportion of the Haitian economy that was exposed to that earthquake, some of the upper estimates was close to the nation's annual GDP."

Shanghai 'most vulnerable to flood risk'
Mark Kinver BBC News 21 Aug 12;

Shanghai is the most vulnerable major city in the world to serious flooding, a study suggests.

Despite its economic wealth, the Chinese city is considered to be more exposed to the risk of flooding than much poorer cities such as Dhaka.

As well as evaluating a city's physical attributes, the study also considers social and economic factors when rating an area's vulnerability.

Details of the research appear in the journal Natural Hazards.

A team of scientists from the UK and the Netherlands has developed a Coastal City Flood Vulnerability Index (CCFVI) based on exposure, susceptibility and resilience to coastal flooding.

Co-author Nigel Wright, from the University of Leeds' School of Civil Engineering, said that current methods tended to be two dimensional.

"Very often we look at these sorts of things in a very deterministic way," he explained.

"We look at physical exposure, so if you live by a river you are exposed to the risk of flooding."

Prof Wright said that the CCFVI used a range of data, consisting of 19 components.

"We still use the physical ones but also economic and social ones, such as how much attention is given by local or national governments to protect citizens and citizens' property through investing in various forms of resilience," he told BBC News.

These included the percentage of a city's population living close to the coastline; the amount of time needed for a city to recover from flooding; the amount of uncontrolled development along the coastline, as well as the volume of measures to physically prevent floodwater entering a city.
Same but different

"What this index tries to do is to widen this out and look at social indicators too," Prof Wright added.

"You can have people who live in the same area but their vulnerability is actually different.

"Age is one of those things; if you are over 65 or under 18 then you are more vulnerable than an adult because you are not able to take the actions necessary to protect yourself or evacuate."

He explained that past experiences played a role in a region's attitude towards the risk of flooding.

"Economies that are developing rapidly have not had to implement resilience in the past because there has not been the economic output to protect.

"At the other end of the scale, somewhere like the Netherlands, where there have been serious floods in the past that have had an impact so they know they need to do it."

While flooding has a local, physical impact, the economic consequences can be felt globally.

Prof Wright observed: "After the Japanese tsunami a lot of hard disk manufacturing was moved to Bangkok, then there were the floods in Bangkok and the price of hard disks went up dramatically because the factories had to close down and there was a shortage of hard disks."

The team's paper focused on nine coastal cities built on river deltas, including Shanghai, Dhaka (Bangladesh), Casablanca (Morocco), Buenos Aires (Argentina), Calcutta (India) and Rotterdam (the Netherlands).