Saturday, October 14, 2017

Disasters are not Acts of God

Apart from death or severe injury in a disaster event, there is no more crushing blow than the loss of the family home. About 14 million people are being made homeless on average each year as a result of sudden disasters such as floods and storms.  The numbers exclude those evacuated ahead of a threat, and people displaced by drought or rising seas.

The risk of displacement could rise as populations swell and the impacts of climate change become more severe, said a report issued on Friday by the United Nations Office for Disaster Risk Reduction (UNISDR) and the Geneva-based Internal Displacement Monitoring Centre (IDMC).

Earthquakes, tsunamis, floods and tropical cyclones are the main disasters forecast to uproot large numbers of people, with countries in Asia, home to 60 percent of the world's population, hit particularly hard.  Eight of the ten countries with the highest levels of displacement and housing loss are in South and Southeast Asia. They include India, where an average of 2.3 million people are forced to leave their homes annually, and China with 1.3 million people uprooted each year.

The most devastating floods to hit South Asia in a decade killed more than 1,400 people this year, and focused attention on poor planning for disasters, as authorities struggled to assist millions of destitute survivors.

Justin Ginnetti, head of data and analysis at the IDMC, told the Thomson Reuters Foundation "We don't want people to think of disaster displacement as some kind of inevitable act of God - this is not a necessary outcome every time there's heavy rainfall," he said. There was a strong correlation between the risk of being uprooted by a disaster and residing in a rapidly urbanising location. With the poor often living on the outskirts of cities, on flood plains or along river banks, Ginnetti said better urban planning could make them less vulnerable. He contrasted Japan and the Philippines, which have roughly the same number of people exposed to cyclones. Japan builds more robust housing and so faces far less displacement in a disaster than the Philippines, where homes are less able to withstand shocks, he said.
Refugees and people uprooted in their own countries are already at record-high numbers.

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