Hi there!
On my last (and very first post) on the 13th October I overlooked that it was the UN International Day for Disaster Reduction. Sorry about that!
In order to make up for this, we will discuss about the topic on today's post. But first things first:
What' s a natural disaster?
An extreme natural event (either geological, hydrological or atmospheric) is not always necessarily a disaster. The event becomes a disaster when it affects populations in any ways.
To put an example, I don't thing nobody would care about an earthquake taking place in the middle of nowhere, right? But the Haiti earthquake in 2010 who killed more than 315.000 people, that was a natural disaster.
In this sense, are natural disasters man-made? (Ashish Bose)
A study by IDMC (Internal Displacement Monitoring Centre) shows that 22 million people were displaced due to natural disasters in 2013. Storms displaced 14.2 million people (Haiyan typhoon in Phillipines displaced 4.1 million people alone), floods displaced 6.2 million, earthquakes 1.2 million, wildfires and extreme temperature displaced 102.000 people and 51.000 where displaced by landslides.
This chart, created by the portal Statista shows the number of people displaced by natural disasters since 2008.
United Nations proclaimed in 1989 the International Decade for Natural Disaster Reduction and with it, an agreement on the measures to work on this line were included. After this decade, the ISDR (International Strategy for Disaster Reduction) is created and remains in force today.
"The aim of ISDR is to combine international efforts with actions to avoid the effects of natural disasters."
The ISDR is especially oriented to developing countries to try to mitigate the loss of life and social and economic disruption caused by disasters.
Major international objectives in this area are:
- Improve the capacity of each country to mitigate the effects of natural disasters, using early warning systems.
- Promote scientific and technical knowledge to reduce human and material losses.
- Provide countries with technical assistance based on prevention, evaluation and diagnosis to mitigate natural disasters.
- Promote education and training projects. *Here you have a small example in the form of didactic game for children.
The last international agreement on the way to the reduction of natural disasters is the Hoygo Framework for Action (HFA) which was signed in 2005 in Japan.
168 countries pledged to introduce measures to prevent and risk assessment in public policy, as well as protocols for actions before, during and after natural disasters.
What about the results?
Around 130 national committees were formed in developing countries but less than half performed effectively.
"Some of them were quite successful in promoting new efforts; for example, the Australian National Committee and the federal agency Emergency Management Australia moved ahead in a broad range of mitigation activities in planning, hazards and risk assessment, and assistance to other countries in the southwestern Pacific region." Mitigation emergencies as major strategy for reducing losses caused by natural disasters. Science 1999
Atmospheric disasters
Lets focus in atmospheric disasters. The most tragic and recent example that comes into our minds is typhoon Haiyan which devastated Philippines almost one year ago on November 8th 2013 with sustained winds of 314km/h and category 6 on the Saffir-Simpson scale (top cathegory). |
| Typhoon Haiyan over Philippines. BBC |
It is clear that little can be done against such a phenomenon (btw, hurricanes, cyclones and typhoons are the same weather phenomenon. We call them differently depending on where they occur). In this case devastation occurred many kilometers inland.
The early warning systems worked as expected and almost all the population was prepared for the typhoon. In this sense, risk prevention mechanisms were very useful but days after Haiyan,
the damage mitigation system showed serious deficiencies: only one public hospital operating in Tacloban, high infection risk, prevention of water-borne outbreaks resulted insufficient, safety of immunization at risk. (Typhoon Haiyan: Philippines faces long road to recovery. Yu-Tzu Chiu). This was largely due to the fact that Philippines is an archipelago and infrastructure were devastated which made logistic extremely complicated.
There is clearly much work left to do on risk and impact mitigation and October 13th is just a day to stop-by and reflect on it.
*This is kind of a depressing topic I' ve chosen...
Laughing at your last point! Even though its depressing, its still important to know what's going on, I suppose that's why we're studying climate and geography! What I great post. An interesting point that you've helped me think about is that its sort of a tragedy that natural disasters like cyclones happen mostly in the south where developing countries are and these are the same countries that find it the hardest to cope
ReplyDeleteHi Priya, yes, that point about the developing countries is very important. Defenses against this kind of events are quite expensive and clearly, it is hard to prioritize these measures if you have other important issues going on...
ReplyDeleteThanks for your comment!