High cost of disasters is due to big rise in exposure of industrial assets and private property, U.N. says
By Megan Rowling
LONDON (AlertNet) - Economic losses from disasters have exceeded $100 billion for three years in a row, the first time this has happened, the U.N. Office for Disaster Risk Reduction (UNISDR) said on Thursday.
The high costs are due to a huge increase in the exposure of industrial assets and private property to disasters, the agency said. Economic losses caused by disasters were $138 billion in 2012, $371 billion in 2011 - a large proportion due to the Japan earthquake and tsunami - and $138 billion in 2010, it added.
"A review of economic losses caused by major disaster events since 1980 shows that since the mid-90s there has been a rise in economic losses and this has turned into an upward trend as confirmed by the losses from last year when, despite no mega-disaster such as a major urban earthquake, economic losses are conservatively estimated in the region of $138 billion," UNISDR Director Elizabeth Longworth said in a statement.
In 2012, some 310 disasters killed 9,330 people and affected 106 million others, according to preliminary data. The deadliest event was Typhoon Bopha which hit the Philippines in December with over 1,900 dead and missing.
The annual average number of disasters from 2002 to 2011 was 380, and the annual average number of affected people was more than 245 million, suggesting that 2012 experienced relatively fewer disasters than recent years, with lower human impact.
Asia showed itself to be the most disaster-prone part of the world once again in 2012, both in terms of the number of disasters and the number of victims, UNISDR said. More than 42 percent of disasters occurred in Asia in 2012, and it had the highest share of deaths at 64 percent and the largest share of affected people at 68 percent. China reported the largest number of natural disasters globally, at 23, followed by the Philippines with 20.
But 63 percent of economic losses were in the Americas, mainly from Hurricane Sandy - which hit the Caribbean and the United States, where it caused damage of $50 billion - and the drought that affected the U.S. Midwest, at $20 billion. Two successive earthquakes in Italy in May 2012 resulted in losses of nearly $16 billion.
Two long cold waves at the beginning and end of last year killed almost 1,000 people in Europe. Africa was severely affected by drought in the Horn and Sahel regions, and also by floods, including those in Nigeria that took over 360 lives.
Debby Guha-Sapir, director of the Centre for Research on the Epidemiology of Disasters (CRED) at Belgium's University of Louvain, which compiles the disaster statistics, noted that floods and droughts were responsible for nearly 80 percent of all disaster victims in 2012. But the economic losses from these disasters were small, as they occurred mainly in poorer countries.
"Even so, the floods of Pakistan cost nearly 2 percent of its annual GDP which is a lot to recover," the professor said. "Disasters are a major problem in all poor countries and threats to global security. They should be taken seriously.”
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