Red Cross Predicts Climatic Super Disasters
GENEVA, June 24 (AFP) - The world is heading for a spate of "super" disasters sparked by a mix of climate change, environmental damage and population pressures, a Red Cross report said on Thursday. The forecast was contained in the World Disasters Report 1999 published by the International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies.
According to the survey, last year's season of natural disasters was the worst on record, causing more damage than ever before.
Most of the destruction to lives and livelihoods occurred in poor countries, just as international aid flows continue to plunge, the report said.
Asia suffered the heaviest toll in terms of fatalities and economic fall-out, with massive flooding ravaging parts of China, Blangadesh and Nepal, murderous cyclones in India and two major earthquakes in Afghanistan.
Of the 60,000 people killed in man-made and natural disasters last year, half of the victims were in Asia, the federation said.
Hurricane Mitch, the deadliest Atlantic hurricane in 200 years, was another mega disaster, spawning landslides and floods mainly in Honduras and Nicaragua that left around 10,000 people dead.
The Pacific's deadly climatic duo, El Nino and La Nina, wreaked worldwide havoc, drenching Latin America but bringing drought to southern and eastern Africa and the worst dry spell in Indonesia in half a century.
The El nino phenomenon shows "compelling" evidence of trends towards weather triggered super-disasters, the report said.
The federation noted that the drought in Indonesia set off a chain reaction of crises from a rice crop failure to massive forest fires burning out of control, paralysing parts of the country with a toxic layer of smoke.
"Everyone is aware of the environmental problems of global warming and deforestation on the one hand, and the social problems of increasing poverty and growing shanty towns on the other," said federation president Astrid Heiberg.
"But when these two factors collide, you have a new scale of catastrophe," she said, adding that the insidious combination was throwing millions more people into the path of potential disaster
In 1998, natural disasters created more "refugees" than wars and conflict as declining soil fertility, drought, flooding and deforestation drove 25 million people from their land into packed city slums.
The report warned that emergency aid funding had dropped by 40 percent between 1994 and 1997 from a peak of 3.5 billion dollars to 2.1 billion as rich countries tightened their purse strings.
In 1998 alone, more than 700 "large-loss" natural disasters caused more than 90 billion dollars in economic losses, far outweighing the insured tally, according to reinsurance firm MunichRe.
In the case of Hurricane Mitch, only two percent of the estimated seven billion dollar economic burden was covered, the report said.
"And that substantial gap will increase as the insurance industry continues to retreat from the front line of disaster coverage to escape escalating losses," the federation said.
Insurance cover for floods, deemed the most murderous catastrophe, is the most scarce.
Floods account for almost half of all economic losses but just 11 percent of insured losses worldwide. In many countries, flood insurance is simply not available, the report pointed out.
The survey did highlight one bright spot.
Data contained in the report showed evidence that higher investment in disaster preparedness pays off.
For instance in China, a recent analysis of disaster preparedness indicated that 3.5 billion dollars invested in flood control over the last 40 years had saved the economy 12 billion dollars in potential losses.