October 21, 2001	Sunday	Shaba'an 3, 1422

WASHINGTON: The 1990s will go down as the decade of calamities despite being declared the “International Decade for Natural Disaster Reduction” by the UN, says a report released here on Thursday.

The decade saw 86 major natural catastrophes - including floods, earthquakes and hurricanes - that required outside assistance because of extensive deaths, said Worldwatch Institute. There were only 20 such events in the 1950s and 47 in the 1970s.

Natural disasters caused more than $608 billion in economic losses during the 1990s - about five times the figure in the 1970s and 15 times the total for the 1950s, said the environmental think-tank.

Why the increase? Janet Abramovitz, a senior researcher at Worldwatch who authored the 62-page report, argued part of the reason is that a growing share of the devastation wrought by natural disasters, like floods and hurricanes, is “unnatural” in origin, caused by destruction to ecosystems. “We have altered so many natural systems so dramatically, their ability to protect us from disturbances is greatly diminished,” she said

The clear-cutting of forests, re-routing of rivers, filling in of wetlands, and destabilisation of the global climate is leading to the unravelling of a complex ecological safety net, warned the report, ‘Unnatural Disasters.’

Asia has been hardest hit by natural disasters, it said, because the region is large and storms, floods and earthquakes frequently hit heavily populated coastal areas.

According to data collected by Munich Re, a German-based international reinsurance company, 77 per cent of the nearly 561,000 people who died in natural disasters between 1985 and 1999 were in Asia. Approximately 45 per cent of all recorded economic losses during the same period, which includes the first two years of the “Asian financial crisis”, were attributed to natural disasters.

Munich reported that 10 per cent of the fatalities between 1985 and 1999 were in South America, while four per cent were in Central America and four per cent in Africa. Less than four per cent of the fatalities were in industrial countries, including European nations and the US. “While poor countries are more vulnerable, in every nation some people and communities - notably the very poor, women and ethnic minorities - are especially hard hit during and after disasters,” it said.

While the death toll per event has declined in recent decades, however, the number of people impacted has grown, according to the report. More people worldwide, it said, are now displaced by natural disasters than by conflict.

“In the last decade over two billion people worldwide have been affected by disasters, about 211 million people per year,” said the report, which acknowledged that some of these people may be affected and counted more than once. Ninety per cent of people impacted were in Asia and six per cent in Africa.

The ever-rising human and economic toll of disasters means that a profound shift is needed in how disasters are approached, said the report. Most attempts to address natural disasters, it argued, wrongly focus on disaster response and recovery or on scientific and technical solutions.

Instead, it urged governments and international institutions to reexamine development choices that have made the threats worse. “While we cannot do away with natural hazards, we can eliminate those that we cause, minimise those we exacerbate, and reduce our vulnerability to most,” said Worldwatch.

Current development trends that make people vulnerable to natural disasters - pressure on ecosystems and concentration of people and infrastructure along coasts and in cities - are growing, it added.

“Many ecosystems have been frayed to the point where they are no longer resilient and able to withstand natural disturbances, setting the stage for “unnatural disasters” - those made more frequent or more severe due to human actions,” it said.

Deforestation, for example, impairs watersheds, raises the risk of fires, and contributes to climate change, it said. Destruction of coastal wetlands, dunes, and mangroves eliminates ”nature’s shock absorbers” for coastal storms.

“Such human-made changes end up making naturally vulnerable areas - such as hillsides, rivers, coastal zones, and low-lying islands - even more vulnerable to extreme weather events,” the report said.

“If we instead choose to work with nature and each other, we can reduce the waves of unnatural disasters that have been washing over the shores of humanity with increasing regularity and ferocity,” said Abramovitz. —Dawn/InterPress Service.