Global climate disasters at decade low in '09

The year 2009 was a benign year, as far as climate disasters are concern. The International Strategy for Disaster Reduction (ISDR), a UN body that also tracks climate disasters worldwide said there were 224 disasters related to climate in the year till November and 7,000 people had lost their lives.

This was much lower in number compared to the worst years, which were the 2004 the tsunami year and 2008 when cyclones took big toll of lives, said Margareta Wahlstrom, UN special representative to ISDR. In 2008, 321 disasters killed 235,816 people, affecting 211 million others at cost a total of $181 billion. The 224 disasters in 2009 related to weather events were 91.4 per cent of the total number of 245 disasters.

Debarati Guha-Sapir from the Centre for Research on Epidemiology of Disasters of the World Health Organisation said that almost half of the disasters which affected human beings happened in Asia. Almost 55 million people were affected this year and a loss of 15 billion happened.

Wahlstrom said that there was a lowering trend of deaths due to disasters in the world but the damage from extreme events was on the rise. It said although 2009 was a better year by disaster standards, the threat from major hazards remained. The assessment did not include drought which officials said was more complicated to assess and takes longer.

She also said that in 2009, 11 million people were affected by floods, much lower than the 178 million people affected in 2007 and the 45 million in 2008. In fact floods were only 20 per cent of the disasters, she said, but affected 80 per cent of the people hit by disasters.

According to Guha-Sapir, the declining trend of deaths was because of better management and earlier warning of impending disasters. Since 1980 the amount of material losses in the poor countries amount to between $10 billion and $15 billion while in the developed nations it was between $20 billion and $70 billion. She said the impact on human beings were also because of the weak structures of disaster mitigation.

The head of World Meteorological Organisation Michel Jarraud said the rising global temperatures posed a problem for the extreme weather, even though 2009 was not so. He said the past was not an indication of the future and one could expect more extreme conditions in the future as “developments like the rising seas” because of the climate would change the equation on the disasters. This would mean the floods and storm surges would be worse than before.

He said the human impact of disasters had been declining. In 1970, a cyclone in Bangladesh killed 300,000 people while the one in 2007 killed 3,500. “That’s still too many deaths, but the management of disasters because of training and education had improved vastly. He said last year, in the five hurricanes in Cuba, the death toll was seven, which was a vast improvement from the earlier disasters and was because of a very efficient early warning system and because of system integration of preventive actions.