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Hurricanes and floods take growing number of victims, disasters on rise: UN
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  • GENEVA (AFP) Sep 17, 2004
    Hurricanes, floods and other natural disasters hit a growing number of people worldwide and are on the increase due partly to global warming, the United Nations' disaster reduction agency said on Friday.

    More than 254 million people were affected by natural hazards last year, a near three-fold jump from 1990, according to data released by the inter-agency secretariat of the International Strategy for Disaster Reduction (UN/ISDR).

    The random nature of disasters makes mapping their impact more difficult as droughts in 2002 pushed the figure of people affected above 734 million.

    But the long-term trend over the past decade shows a steady rise in victims, according to the statistics from the Centre for Research on the Epidemiology of Disaters at the University of Louvain in Belgium.

    "Not only is the world globally facing more potential disasters, but increasing numbers of people are becoming vulnerable to hazards," the UN/ISDR said in a statement.

    Disasters ranging from storms, earthquakes and volcanoes to wild fires, droughts and landslides killed some 83,000 people in 2003 compared with about 53,000 deaths 13 years earlier, it noted.

    In addition, storms and freak temperatures appear to be on the rise with 337 natural disasters reported in 2003 up from 261 in 1990, the agency said.

    An onslaught of deadly hurricanes that have battered the southern United States support theories that such storms are occurring more frequently.

    "Look at the number of hurricanes this year, it is hard to keep up with all the names," said John Harding, a programme officer at the UN/ISDR.

    "The scientific community tells us that the intensity and frequency of disasters are very likely to increase in the medium-term due to climate change and that increase may well be occurring at this stage," he told AFP.

    The United Nations will hold a conference on disaster reduction in Kobe, Japan -- itself hit by a devastating earthquake in 1995 -- from January 18 to 22 to explore the issue.

    Salvano Briceno, the director of UN/ISDR, blamed a rise in the number of people living in cities, where they are more likely to be affected by a natural disaster, for the rising number of victims.

    "Urban migrants settle in exposed stretches of land either on seismic faults, flooding plains or on landslide prone slopes," he said in a statement.

    "Alarmingly, this is getting worse," he warned, noting that a lack of facilities such as schools and hospitals in rural communities is forcing people to move to built-up areas.

    A report by UN Habitat, the settlement agency, has said the number of people living in slums will hit two billion by 2020 and the city-dwelling population will rise to five billion by 2025.

    If a hazard struck one of 70 of the world's larger cities that are located in risk areas "the potential for disasters could be huge," UN/ISDR said, urging governments and local communities to better prepare themselves.

    Most poor countries lack the insurance policies and state support systems in place in the developed world to deal with a crisis, Harding explained.

    "Once you lose your goods or cattle, there is no mechanism that allows you to come back even to the state you were in before the disaster, which was already extremely vulnerable," he said.

    "It is a downward spiral because we know some of these disasters are recurrent -- there will be floods in Bangladesh next year, the cyclones occur year in and year out."

    Demonstrating the chaos inflicted by natural hazards, the latest storm to lash the United States -- Hurricane Ivan -- has killed at least 14 people, with three states declared official disaster areas and three cities under dusk-to-dawn curfews.




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